Design of RIS-UAV-Assisted LEO Satellite Constellation Communication

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations play a pivotal role in sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks by providing global coverage, massive connections, and huge capacity. In this paper, we present a novel LEO satellite constellation communication framework, where a reconfigurable intelligent surface-mounted unmanned aerial vehicle (RIS-UAV) is deployed to improve the communication quality of multiple terrestrial user equipments (UEs) under the condition of long distance between satellite and ground. To reduce the overhead for channel state information (CSI) acquisition with multiple-satellite collaboration, statistical CSI (sCSI) is utilized in the system. In such a situation, we first derive an approximated but exact expression for ergodic rate of each UE. Then, we aim to maximize the minimum approximated UE ergodic rate by the proposed alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm that jointly optimizes LEO satellite beamforming, RIS phase shift, and UAV trajectory. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm in terms of spectrum efficiency over baseline algorithms.