OTFS Enabled LEO Satellite Communications: A Promising Solution to Severe Doppler Effects

With the advantages of low cost and flexible deployment, low earth orbit satellite (LEO-Sat) communications have received widespread attentions, such as providing global wireless access with enhanced data rates in future 6G networks. However, due to the feature of high-mobility, LEO-Sat communications are facing severe Doppler effects, which heavily degrades the link reliability. The existing approaches for coping with Doppler effects, such as phase locked loop, mainly carry out the prediction and compensation for Doppler frequency shifts, which demands high implementation complexity, as well as accurate channel estimation. Against this background, this article portrays a new paradigm of reliable LEO-Sat communications with the aid of orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation scheme, which can average out the channel dynamics through modulating information in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain, thereby overcoming severe Doppler effects. In particular, we start with studying the Doppler effect characteristics of LEO-Sat communications, which serves as the motivations of using OTFS. Then, we conceive a case study to show the feasibility of OTFS enabled LEO-Sat communication by evaluating the reliability performance. Finally, we discuss a range of promising research opportunities and potential challenges.