Abstract:
Against the backdrop of the difficulties in deploying overseas gateway stations, the surging demand for data landing, and the escalating pressure on the operation, maintenance, and management of large-scale low earth orbit (LEO) constellations for China′s LEO satellites, maximizing the effective communication duration of the feeder link during the satellite′s transit time has become a crucial challenge. Addressing this issue, an adaptive cross-station handover method for feeder links based on satellite-ground dual beams is proposed in this paper. In that method, seamless cross-station handover of the feeder link is achieved by allowing the satellite to independently control the coordination of the dual beams according to the location information of the ground gateway stations and real-time satellite orbit data. Simulation results show that the proposed method can increase the effective communication duration of the feeder link for a single satellite by at least 22% in scenarios that three gateway stations are visible. Moreover, during the cross-station handover process the proposed method ensures no service interruption and no data loss, without introducing the risk of out-of-order service packets or additional storage overhead. Meanwhile, the proposed method supports the autonomous establishment and disconnection of the feeder link, significantly reducing the daily operation and maintenance difficulties of the constellation, and providing an innovative solution for the efficient operation of the satellite communication system.