Robust PNT beam allocation under urban blockage

Evaluate and optimize the use of more than the minimum four PNT beams to compensate for signal blockage in urban scenarios and improve geometric dilution of precision (GDOP).

Background

The paper models PNT availability under a line-of-sight assumption and declares a cell served when at least K_min = 4 distinct satellites provide ranging signals. Under this assumption, allocating more than four PNT beams offers no additional positioning benefit and only consumes satellite beam resources.

Urban environments may introduce signal blockage, reducing the number of usable satellites, while additional measurements may improve GDOP. The paper therefore explicitly identifies evaluation and optimization of allocations exceeding the minimum number of beams as future work, extending the current line-of-sight and minimum-visibility model toward more realistic urban positioning conditions.

References

A future work should evaluate and optimize the use of more beams than $K_{\min}$ to cope with urban scenarios, where some blockage is expected, and improved $\mathrm{GDOP}$.

— Beam scheduling policy for communications and PNT services from LEO satellites  (2608.28217 - Gonzalez-Garrido et al., 28 Aug 2026) in Section 2, subsection “PNT model”