Connectivity Analysis of Mega-Constellation Satellite Networks With Optical Intersatellite Links

Recently, low earth orbit (LEO) satellite-based systems have attracted tremendous attention and various technologies have been developed for payload miniaturization and optical communications. In addition, mega-constellation architectures are expected to be deployed with LEO satellites for global broadband networks. In this article, we present a thorough analysis of mega-constellation architecture in terms of a change in the number of visible satellites and antenna steering capability to investigate the impact of increase in the constellation size and adoption of optical intersatellite links. The network architecture is evaluated with respect to satellite antenna steering capability and the satellite visibility considering the very narrow beam divergence of optical communications. We analyze the impact of a change in relative positions among the satellites due to continuous satellite movement in the constellation. The results offer guidelines for designing a novel visibility matrix using a time-varying satellite topology. This could defuse the problem of the conventional studies using fixed visibility matrices. The proposed time-varying visibility matrix achieves better performance than the previous preassigned links in terms of end-to-end link distance and hop count of LEO satellite networks.