Fundamental Limits and Joint Design for Monostatic Joint Communications and Sensing in LEO Satellites

Abstract

Monostatic joint communication and sensing (JCAS) from a low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite requires full-duplex (FD) operation, with self-interference (SI) $80$--$100$~dB stronger than the ground echo. The echo returns milliseconds after transmission, whereas the onboard coupling spans a few symbols. We develop a theory and a design that exploit this separation. Restricting the analog and digital cancellers to the short SI support is without loss of optimality and essential in practice: a least-squares canceller whose support contains the target delay absorbs the coherent echo and reduces the radar SINR by a closed-form factor, about $18$~dB for a vessel at its zero-Doppler crossing. Modeling the SI that no linear canceller can reconstruct as spatially white and accounting for ADC quantization, we derive in closed form a ceiling on the radar SINR, the minimum pre-ADC SI power under a canceller tap budget, the budget for full cancellation, and the sensing weight at which the optimal design changes over from communication to sensing. We then maximize a weighted sum of the communication and sensing SINRs, each normalized by its half-duplex benchmark, over the beamformers, sensing covariance, combiners, and cancellers for $K$ users and $Q$ targets, using an alternating algorithm with closed-form updates. Simulations confirm the closed forms. The joint design gains up to $13\%$ in the normalized objective over a sequential design that cancels the SI only at the receiver, and more than $10$~dB of downlink and radar SINR with $4$-bit ADCs and in the 10th-percentile worst-target SINR of four targets, whereas ignoring the SI overloads the ADCs.