Work

Cooperative Design of Ranging and Communication for In-Band Full-Duplex Inter-Satellite Links

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: To address the limited communication capacity of the traditional time-division half-duplex (TDHD) systems in BDS-3 inter-satellite links (ISLs), this paper proposes a cooperative design of ranging and communication based on an in-band full-duplex (IBFD) architecture. By utilizing BDS broadcast ephemeris to assist signal acquisition and selecting the serial acquisition strategy with the lowest computational complexity, a 100% acquisition success rate can be achieved within milliseconds. This completely releases the 250 ms preamble originally used for acquisition in the traditional time slot. Adopting the IBFD system, the ISL time-slot structure is optimally redesigned: the preamble is used for signal acquisition and tracking to accomplish inter-satellite ranging, while the original measurement period is used for QPSK dual-channel parallel data transmission. This design extends the effective communication duration from 1 s to 2.5 s, expands the communication from single-channel to dual-channel, and theoretically achieves a 5-fold improvement in communication efficiency. Simulation analysis shows that, while the communication efficiency is significantly improved, the ranging accuracy remains essentially unchanged compared with the traditional TDHD system. Without altering the existing 3 s time-slot duration, this method achieves cooperative optimization of ranging and communication, providing a feasible technical solution for enhancing the communication capacity of BDS-3 ISLs.

Source: Sensors

DOI: 10.3390/s26103013