Distributed MIMO-LEO Satellites Communication

This paper investigates cooperative gain and power control in MIMO-enabled low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications under dominant line-of-sight (LoS) propagation. To enable theoretical analysis, the minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimator is employed to characterize channel estimation errors, based on which a closed-form lower bound on the achievable data rate is derived. Building on this, we formulate and solve a sum-rate maximization problem by jointly optimizing satellite combination strategies and transmit power. Numerical results validate the tightness of the analytical bound, particularly for large Rician factors, and demonstrate substantial performance gains over existing benchmarks.