Rotatable Antenna Enabled Multi-Satellite Communications: Joint Satellite Selection and Boresight Trajectory Optimization

Abstract

This paper considers a satellite-to-ground communication system in which a ground station (GS) equipped with independently rotatable antenna (RA) elements jointly decodes independent streams from multiple low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites over a shared time--frequency resource. Specifically, we formulate a two-timescale throughput maximization problem under exogenous cochannel interference, capturing serving-set composition, RA-enabled channel shaping, time-varying satellite geometry, and mechanically constrained inter-epoch reconfiguration. We first characterize the joint effects of interference-whitened channel strength and spatial separability on multi-satellite reception, motivating the joint design of satellite selection and RA control. With the RA trajectory fixed, we establish the monotone submodularity of the epoch-level selection objective and construct an incumbent-tight modular lower-bound surrogate, leading to an efficient discrete Minorization-Maximization (MM) selection algorithm. For fixed serving sets, we develop slew-feasible RA updates based on Riemannian gradients and organize them into a two-color parallel update scheme. The two blocks are integrated into a monotone alternating algorithm with guaranteed objective convergence. Simulations demonstrate consistent gains over benchmark schemes and reveal an optimal balance between channel strength and spatial separability. The results further show that satellite selection is particularly important in underloaded and actuator-limited regimes, whereas RA shaping becomes more influential near full spatial loading.