A Hybrid NOMA-OMA Scheme for Inter-plane Intersatellite Communications in Massive LEO Constellations

Communication between satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellations takes place through intersatellite links (ISLs). Unlike intra-plane ISLs, which interconnect satellites belonging to the same orbital plane with fixed relative distance, inter-plane ISLs experience significant Doppler frequency shifts, since satellites belonging to different orbital planes exhibit time-varying relative distance (required, e.g., to minimize the risk of physical collisions between satellites). In this paper, we consider the problem of connecting multiple satellites, belonging a massive LEO Walker Delta constellation, to a receiving satellite, referred to as the sink. Specifically, we consider a hybrid multiple access scheme, which employs a combination of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), where ISLs share the same time-frequency resource blocks, and orthogonal multiple access (OMA), where ISLs employs orthogonal resource blocks. To this aim, the set of satellites transmitting towards the sink is divided into groups, where NOMA is employed within each group, whereas OMA is used to separate different groups. Such a scheme subsumes as special cases both pure-OMA and pure-NOMA. Our study highlights that similar Doppler frequency shifts have a large impact on the individual rates of the satellites in a pure-NOMA scheme, thus reducing the network fairness of this technique. Motivated by such a fact, we develop design strategies of the proposed hybrid NOMA-OMA scheme, which exploit inter-plane Doppler frequency diversity to enhance fairness among the satellites, while ensuring a significantly higher sum-rate capacity compared to the pure-OMA technique. Numerical results corroborate our theoretical analysis, by demonstrating both the fairness enhancement of the proposed techniques over the pure-NOMA scheme, as well as their capacity improvement over the pure-OMA one.