A New Paradigm for Non-Geostationary Satellite Communications and Radio Astronomy System

This paper proposes a new paradigm to accommodate the rapid growth of non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) satellite communications system (SCS) and radio astronomy system (RAS). Traditionally, SCS and RAS are operated in different frequency bands to avoid radio frequency interference (RFI). However, the prospects of large-scale NGSO satellites cast a distressful RFI scenario to the ground-based RAS observations. By integrating SCS and RAS into the NGSO satellite system, the proposed paradigm mitigates the RFI significantly, enables plenty of new observation opportunities and capabilities for RAS, provides higher throughput for SCS, and creates potential new services/revenues for SCS. Potential deployment scenarios are discussed. In addition, the paper addresses two related problems of the new paradigm, namely the spectrum resource allocation problem and the RAS data transport problem. Simulation results demonstrate the performance advantages of the proposed paradigm and related solutions.