Continuous aperture array-assisted integrated communication and navigation in low Earth orbit satellite constellations

Qi WANG; Xiaoming CHEN; Qiao QI; Zhaolin WANG; Yuanwei LIU

doi:10.1631/ENG.ITEE.2026.0090

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Continuous aperture array-assisted integrated communication and navigation in low Earth orbit satellite constellations

Regular Papers | Updated：2026-08-28

- Continuous aperture array-assisted integrated communication and navigation in low Earth orbit satellite constellations
- Continuous aperture array-assisted integrated communication and navigation in low Earth orbit satellite constellations
- ENGINEERING Information Technology & Electronic Engineering Vol. 27, Issue 8, Pages: 1-16(2026)
- Affiliations：
  
  College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China
  School of Information Science and Technology, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou 311121, China
  Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 999077, China
- Author bio：
  
  ✉ Xiaoming CHEN, chen_xiaoming@zju.edu.cn
- Funds：
- DOI：10.1631/ENG.ITEE.2026.0090
  CLC： TN927.2
- Received：01 April 2026，
  
  Revised：2026-06-16，
  
  Online First：23 July 2026，
  
  Published：01 August 2026
- Accepted：
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Qi WANG, Xiaoming CHEN, Qiao QI, et al. Continuous aperture array-assisted integrated communication and navigation in low Earth orbit satellite constellations[J]. ENGINEERING Information Technology & Electronic Engineering, 2026, 27(8): 1-16.
DOI：

Qi WANG, Xiaoming CHEN, Qiao QI, et al. Continuous aperture array-assisted integrated communication and navigation in low Earth orbit satellite constellations[J]. ENGINEERING Information Technology & Electronic Engineering, 2026, 27(8): 1-16. DOI： 10.1631/ENG.ITEE.2026.0090.

摘要

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel continuous aperture array (CAPA)-assisted integrated communication and navigation (ICAN) framework for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. Within this framework

an electromagnetic-based collaborative transmission model is developed

in which multiple satellites equipped with CAPAs simultaneously radiate downlink data streams and navigation reference signals over a shared spectrum. Building upon this

the achievable communication rate and the navigation Cramér–Rao bound (CRB) are derived

which explicitly characterize the intrinsic coupling between the dual-function beamformers and system performance. To improve the positioning accuracy with a communication quality of service guarantee

a joint beamforming optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average CRB subject to transmit power budgets and minimum rate constraints. To tackle the inherent infinite dimensionality of the CAPA beamformer design

an ICAN channel subspace is introduced to equivalently transform the formulation into a tractable finite-dimensional problem

which is then efficiently solved via an iterative convex optimization algorithm. Finally

numerical results demonstrate that the proposed CAPA-assisted beamforming design algorithm significantly outperforms conventional discrete phased array architectures and other benchmark schemes

yielding notable improvements in ICAN performance.

关键词

Keywords

references

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