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
- 连续孔径阵列辅助的低轨卫星星座通信导航一体化
- 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

本文提出了一种新颖的连续孔径阵列辅助的低轨卫星星座通信导航一体化架构。在该架构中，构建了基于电磁理论的协同传输模型，其中多个部署有连续孔径阵列的卫星在共享频谱上同时发射下行数据信号和导航参考信号。在此基础上，推导了可达的通信传输速率和导航克拉美罗下界，显式刻画了双功能波束成形与系统性能之间的内在耦合关系。为在保障通信服务质量的同时提升导航定位精度，本文建立了联合波束成形优化问题，在发射功率预算和最小速率约束下最小化平均克拉美罗下界。针对连续孔径阵列波束成形设计固有的无限维特性，本文引入通信导航一体化信道子空间，将原问题等价转化为可处理的有限维优化问题，并进一步通过迭代凸优化算法进行高效求解。最后，数值结果表明，所提出的连续孔径阵列辅助波束成形设计算法显著优于传统离散相控阵架构及其他基准方案，能够有效提升低轨卫星星座通信导航一体化性能。

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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