Elastic Spectrum Sensing: An Adaptive Sensing Method for Non-Terrestrial Communication Under Highly Dynamic Channels

With the rapid development of space technology, the role of satellite communications has become progressively significant. Non-terrestrial communication is deemed a critical scenario in the sixth generation (6G) communication systems, which showcases seamless connectivity, minimal geographic constraints and substantial communication capacity. Simultaneously, satellites and terminals spring up, spatial density increases, which further emphasizes the scarcity of spectrum resources. Consequently, to improve spectrum utilization for non-terrestrial communication is a significant concern. Spectrum sensing, which allows dynamic resource reuse, plays an important role in 6G. However, high mobility in non-terrestrial scenarios poses great challenges, such as fast time-varying channels, Doppler effect, etc., which seriously affect sensing accuracy and cannot well support optimal spectrum utilization. Motivated by such circumstances, this paper proposes an elastic sensing method for the downlink non-terrestrial communication scenario. Firstly, we design the system architecture and sensing workflow. To overcome the negative effects raised by high mobility, we propose the elastic sensing criterion and multi-area dividing scheme for the sensing zone. Thresholds affected by the elastic sensing are derived for different areas. Finally, the numerical results show that from -10 dB to -5 dB, the proposed method can improve the total performance by an average of 28.3% while stabilizing the false alarm probability around 0.1 typical level and demonstrating higher constancy compared with traditional technologies from −10 dB to −5 dB.