Beam scheduling policy for communications and PNT services from LEO satellites

Abstract: Future low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations are expected to provide positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) as a native service alongside broadband, removing the GNSS dependency inherited by 5G non-terrestrial networks. This is known in the literature as fused PNT. This paper asks how a multibeam satellites in a LEO constellation should share their beams and power between a communication service (COM) and PNT in the scenario when communications keep full priority. Each beam on a satellite can provide a communication service, a PNT service or both (this under certain limitations). Then, the PNT service is evaluated by the share of area the reach $95\%$-of-time availability for a fixed maximum power available on each satellite. This paper present this PNT availability question as a beam-power budget, as the PNT beams do not need to transmit at the same power as the communication beams thanks to the processing gain on the receiver. Two satellite beam scheduler policies are compared: one where on a cell the beam serving COM demand is exclusive for COM, therefore the PNT service in this cell is provided by the other satellites in line of sight, it requires no signal modification and attains $70.5\%$ / $88.2\%$ availability under homogeneous/population-weighted traffic profiles; and a second policy, the COM beam can provide also PNT signals, this in-beam ranging embeds the ranging signal in the COM waveform, reaching the ceiling at the cost of waveform redesign. The availability gap between the two policies is concentrated on the thin-overlap equatorial belt.