Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication is crucial for wireless communication. While manufacturing and launching LEO satellites have become more efficient and cost-effective, ground stations are still costly due to the complex designs needed for handling severe path losses and precise beam tracking. Thus, developing low-cost, high-performance ground stations is vital for the widespread adoption of LEO satellite communication. We have designed a passive metasurface-enhanced LEO ground station system, named PMSat, which integrates the metasurface’s detailed beamforming with a small phased array’s adaptive steering and focusing. For the uplink, we optimize both the phased array codebook and the metasurface phase profile, enabling electronic steering by codeword switching. We also optimize the downlink metasurface phase profile to boost focusing performance and enhance received signal strength (RSS) across various incident angles. The PMSat prototype features a single passive metasurface with 21 × 21 elements for uplink and 22 × 22 for downlink, plus 1 × 4 phased array antennas for both receiving and transmitting. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of PMSat, showing that the optimized metasurface increases the SNR by 8.32 dB and 16.57 dB for uplink and downlink, respectively.

About Bei Ouyang

Bei Ouyang is a PhD student at Wireless Networking Group in IMDEA Networks Institute. She received her Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering Rice University, Texas, USA in 2021 and a Bachelor degree in Electrical and Information Engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology in 2020. She had been Research Intern with Wireless and Networking research group (Microsoft Research Asia), Rice University and Western University in 2022, 2021 and 2019 respectively. Her research interests lies broadly in Wireless Systems, Radio Engineering and Radar Systems with keen interest in Metasurface designing, Sensing at mmWave.

This event will be conducted in English