Collaborative LEO Satellites for Secure and Green Internet of Remote Things

The Internet of Remote Things (IoRT) supported by low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites is becoming indispensable for remote sensing and it will play an important role in the forthcoming sixth-generation (6G) communication network. In exploring its applications in remote mining and smart grid, etc., it is found that the implementation of IoRT faces challenges, including limited energy supplies, high-mobility, and security vulnerabilities. To address these challenges, we propose employing collaborative LEO satellites to enable the implementation of secure and green IoRT. By combining the uplink signals received at collaborative LEO satellites, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be significantly improved, so that relieving the transmit power requirement of the energy-limited terminal. Aiming at constructing a collaborative LEO satellite-based IoRT network, this article introduces the system design principles regarding to frequency planning, waveform selection, collaboration strategies, and terminal design. In order to obtain optimal collaboration performance, we propose a signal coherent combining scheme to compensate Doppler shift, propagation delay, and phase differences. Furthermore, we propose a modified SUMPLE algorithm to estimate and compensate phase differences among satellites, which is applicable to direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) signal scheme. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional SUMPLE algorithm in combining gain.