Scalable precision positioning and ranging for large satellite swarms

Develop and establish the scalability of optical, ultrawide-band, or carrier-phase GNSS positioning and ranging technologies to hundreds or thousands of formation-flying satellites while maintaining the centimetre-level relative-position accuracy required for distributed beamforming.

Background

The numerical results indicate that keeping sum-rate degradation below 10% requires estimating satellite positions with an error no greater than approximately 2 cm. The paper notes that several technologies can achieve sub-decimetre precision, and that carrier-phase GNSS has been validated for a two-satellite swarm. Whether these approaches can scale to the hundreds or thousands of satellites envisioned for large distributed apertures remains unresolved and may limit practical swarm size.

References

The scalability of these methods to hundreds or thousands of satellites is still an open research problem, which may ultimately limit the maximum practical distribution of satellites, particularly in the shorter term.

— Satellite Swarms for Direct-to-Cell Networks: A Distribution-Performance Trade-off Analysis  (2609.01380 - Artiga et al., 1 Sep 2026) in Section VII, Impact of position and synchronization errors