Federated Beamforming with Subarrayed Planar Arrays for B5G/6G LEO Non-Terrestrial Networks

Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) will be an essential element in Beyond-5G (B5G) and 6G ecosystems, with the purpose of enabling seamless and global coverage, as well as supporting high data rate services. To achieve that, Full Frequency Reuse (FFR) schemes, along with digital beamforming techniques to cope with the Co-Channel Interference (CCI), are considered as promising strategies in 6G NTN. In this paper, we address the design of Cell-Free (CF) MIMO algorithms in NTN composed of multiple swarms of Non-GeoSynchronous Orbit (NGSO) nodes, in which each swarm performs distributed digital beamforming schemes. Furthermore, aiming at increasing the directivity of on-board antenna arrays for each NGSO node and enhancing the interference mitigation, we propose a Limited Field of View (LFoV) planar array architecture built up of smaller planar subarrays. We evaluate the performance of distributed beamforming schemes including both Channel State Information (CSI)-based, e.g., digital Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE), and position-based such as analog Conventional Beamforming (CBF). We provide a numerical analysis of the performance in terms of per-user spectral efficiency. The results show that our proposed subarrayed architecture designed for federated CF-MIMO beamforming outperforms the reference approach without subarraying in the proposed NTN system architecture.