Continuous Aperture Array-Assisted Integrated Communication and Navigation in LEO Satellite Constellations

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel continuous aperture array (CAPA)-assisted integrated communication and navigation (ICAN) framework for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. Within this framework, an electromagnetic-based collaborative transmission model is developed, in which multiple satellites equipped with CAPAs simultaneously radiate downlink data streams and navigation reference signals over shared spectrum. Building upon this, the achievable communication rate and the navigation Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) are derived, which explicitly characterize the intrinsic coupling between the dual-function beamformers and system performance. To improve the positioning accuracy with communication quality of service guarantee, a joint beamforming optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average CRB subject to transmit power budgets and minimum rate constraints. To tackle the inherent infinite-dimensionality of the CAPA beamformer design, an ICAN channel subspace is introduced to equivalently transform the formulation into a tractable finite-dimensional problem, which is then efficiently solved via an iterative convex optimization algorithm. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that the proposed CAPA-assisted beamforming design algorithm significantly outperforms conventional discrete phased array architectures and other benchmark schemes, yielding notable improvements in ICAN performance.