An Analytical Framework for Downlink LEO Satellite Communications based on Cox Point Processes

This work develops an analytical framework for downlink low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications, leveraging tools from stochastic geometry. We propose a tractable approach to the analysis of such satellite communication systems accounting for the fact that satellites are located on circular orbits. We accurately characterize this geometric property of such LEO satellite constellations by developing a Cox point process model that jointly produces orbits and satellites on these orbits. Our work differs from existing studies that have assumed satellites' locations as completely random binomial point processes. For this Cox model, we derive the outage probability of the proposed network and the distribution of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of an arbitrarily located user in the network. By determining various network performance metrics as functions of key network parameters, this work allows one to assess the statistical properties of downlink LEO satellite communications and thus can be used as a system-level design tool.