arXiv subjects

Juha Park

Publications and source records attributed to Juha Park.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Rainbow Beamforming for Wideband LEO Satellite Communications: Principles, Applications, and Technical Challenges

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications (SATCOM) has emerged as a key enabler of global connectivity for 6G networks. To overcome the significant path loss of space-to-ground links, high-gain directional beamforming (BF) is indispensable. As LEO systems evolve toward wider bandwidths to support data-intensive applications, however, they encounter a fundamental physical limitation known as the beam-squint effect, which induces frequency-dependent beam misalignment. Conventionally, the beam-squint effect has been treated as a critical performance impairment that must be mitigated. This article introduces a paradigm shift in wideband LEO satellite systems by redefining beam-squint as a valuable source of frequency-spatial diversity and presents the principles of rainbow BF. Rather than mitigating beam squint, rainbow BF deliberately exploits it to generate frequency-dependent beams, enabling different frequency components to illuminate distinct spatial directions using only a single or a small number of radio frequency chains. By supporting dynamic frequency-spatial beam allocation, rainbow BF offers enhanced flexibility and scalability for wideband LEO SATCOM. We further illustrate the benefits of rainbow BF through three representative LEO SATCOM applications: i) massive multiple access to overcome the latency and throughput bottlenecks of conventional beam hopping; ii) integrated sensing and communications for simultaneous target detection and data transmission; and iii) rapid satellite acquisition to reduce search overhead and improve link reliability. Finally, we discuss key implementation challenges and outline promising future research directions for rainbow BF in wideband LEO SATCOM.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2026

Weighted Knowledge Distillation for Semi-Supervised Segmentation of Maxillary Sinus in Panoramic X-ray Images

Accurate segmentation of maxillary sinus in panoramic X-ray images is essential for dental diagnosis and surgical planning; however, this task remains relatively underexplored in dental imaging research. Structural overlap, ambiguous anatomical boundaries inherent to two-dimensional panoramic projections, and the limited availability of large scale clinical datasets with reliable pixel-level annotations make the development and evaluation of segmentation models challenging. To address these challenges, we propose a semi-supervised segmentation framework that effectively leverages both labeled and unlabeled panoramic radiographs, where knowledge distillation is utilized to train a student model with reliable structural information distilled from a teacher model. Specifically, we introduce a weighted knowledge distillation loss to suppress unreliable distillation signals caused by structural discrepancies between teacher and student predictions. To further enhance the quality of pseudo labels generated by the teacher network, we introduce SinusCycle-GAN which is a refinement network based on unpaired image-to-image translation. This refinement process improves the precision of boundaries and reduces noise propagation when learning from unlabeled data during semi-supervised training. To evaluate the proposed method, we collected clinical panoramic X-ray images from 2,511 patients, and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation models, achieving the Dice score of 96.35\% while reducing boundary error. The results indicate that the proposed semi-supervised framework provides robust and anatomically consistent segmentation performance under limited labeled data conditions, highlighting its potential for broader dental image analysis applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Beam Sweeping: One-Shot Satellite Acquisition with Doppler-Aware Rainbow Beamforming

High-gain beamforming (BF) is essential for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications to overcome severe path loss, but this requires acquiring precise satellite positions. Conventional satellite acquisition typically relies on time-domain beam sweeping, which incurs substantial overhead and latency. In this correspondence, we propose an efficient one-shot satellite acquisition framework that capitalizes on two phenomena traditionally regarded as impairments: i) Doppler effects and ii) beam-squint effects. Specifically, we derive a closed-form \emph{rainbow beamformer} that leverages beam-squint effects to align frequency-dependent beam directions with satellite positions inferred from their Doppler shifts. This approach enables reception from multiple satellites at once without requiring beam sweeping. To extract satellite position information, we develop three Doppler-aware angle estimation algorithms based on received signals. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms conventional beam sweeping approaches in both acquisition accuracy and required time slots. These gains stem from the ability of the proposed rainbow BF to exploit the \emph{angle-dependent nature of Doppler shifts}, enabling full angular-domain coverage with a single pilot transmission and reception.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Embracing Beam-Squint Effects for Wideband LEO Satellite Communications: A 3D Rainbow Beamforming Approach

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications (SATCOM) offers high-throughput, low-latency global connectivity to a very large number of users. To accommodate this demand with limited hardware resources, beam hopping (BH) has emerged as a prominent approach in LEO SATCOM. However, its time-domain switching mechanism confines coverage to a small fraction of the service area during each time slot, exacerbating uplink throughput bottlenecks and latency issues as the user density increases. Meanwhile, wideband systems experience the beam-squint effect, where analog beamforming (BF) directions vary with subcarrier frequencies, potentially causing misalignment at certain frequencies, thereby hindering the performance of wideband SATCOM. In this paper, we aim to shift the paradigm in wideband LEO SATCOM from beam-squint as an impairment to beam-squint as an asset. Specifically, we put forth 3D rainbow BF employing a joint phase-time array (JPTA) antenna with true time delay (TTD) to intentionally widen the beam-squint angle, steering frequency-dependent beams toward distributed directions. This novel approach enables the satellite to serve its entire coverage area in a single time slot. By doing so, the satellite simultaneously receives uplink signals from a massive number of users, significantly boosting throughput and reducing latency. To realize 3D rainbow BF, we formulate a JPTA beamformer optimization problem and address the non-convex nature of the optimization problem through a novel joint alternating and decomposition-based optimization framework. Through numerical evaluations incorporating realistic 3D LEO SATCOM geometry, our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed rainbow BF-empowered LEO SATCOM achieves up to 2.8-fold increase in uplink throughput compared to conventional BH systems. These results mark a significant breakthrough for 6G wideband LEO SATCOM.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Rate-Matching Framework for RSMA-Enabled Multibeam LEO Satellite Communications

With the goal of ubiquitous global connectivity, multibeam low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication (SATCOM) has attracted significant attention in recent years. The traffic demands of users are heterogeneous within the broad coverage of SATCOM due to different geological conditions and user distributions. Motivated by this, this paper proposes a novel rate-matching (RM) framework based on rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) that minimizes the difference between the traffic demands and offered rates while simultaneously minimizing transmit power for power-hungry satellite payloads. Moreover, channel phase perturbations arising from channel estimation and feedback errors are considered to capture realistic multibeam LEO SATCOM scenarios. To tackle the non-convexity of the RSMA-based RM problem under phase perturbations, we convert it into a tractable convex form via the successive convex approximation method and present an efficient algorithm to solve the RM problem. Through the extensive numerical analysis across various traffic demand distribution and channel state information accuracy at LEO satellites, we demonstrate that RSMA flexibly allocates the power between common and private streams according to different traffic patterns across beams, thereby efficiently satisfying users non-uniform traffic demands. In particular, the use of common messages plays a vital role in overcoming the limited spatial dimension available at LEO satellites, enabling it to manage inter- and intra-beam interference effectively in the presence of phase perturbation.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2024

Rate-Splitting for Joint Unicast and Multicast Transmission in LEO Satellite Networks with Non-Uniform Traffic Demand

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications (SATCOM) with ubiquitous global connectivity is deemed a pivotal catalyst in advancing wireless communication systems for 5G and beyond. LEO SATCOM excels in delivering versatile information services across expansive areas, facilitating both unicast and multicast transmissions via high-speed broadband capability. Nonetheless, given the broadband coverage of LEO SATCOM, traffic demand distribution within the service area is non-uniform, and the time/frequency/power resources available at LEO satellites remain significantly limited. Motivated by these challenges, we propose a rate-matching framework for non-orthogonal unicast and multicast (NOUM) transmission. Our approach aims to minimize the difference between offered rates and traffic demands for both unicast and multicast messages. By multiplexing unicast and multicast transmissions over the same radio resource, rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) is employed to manage interference between unicast and multicast streams, as well as inter-user interference under imperfect channel state information at the LEO satellite. To address the formulated problems non-smoothness and non-convexity, the common rate is approximated using the LogSumExp technique. Thereafter, we represent the common rate portion as the ratio of the approximated function, converting the problem into an unconstrained form. A generalized power iteration (GPI)-based algorithm, coined GPI-RS-NOUM, is proposed upon this reformulation. Through comprehensive numerical analysis across diverse simulation setups, we demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms various benchmarks for LEO SATCOM with uneven traffic demands.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2024

A Bistatic ISAC Framework for LEO Satellite Systems: A Rate-Splitting Approach

Aiming to achieve ubiquitous global connectivity and target detection on the same platform with improved spectral/energy efficiency and reduced onboard hardware cost, low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems capable of simultaneously performing communications and radar have attracted significant attention. Designing such a joint system should address not only the challenges of integrating two functions but also the unique propagation characteristics of the satellites. To overcome severe echo signal path loss due to the high altitude of the satellite, we put forth a bistatic integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework with a radar receiver separated from the satellite. For robust and effective interference management, we employ rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA), which splits and encodes users messages into private and common streams. We optimize the dual-functional precoders to maximize the minimum rate among all users while satisfying the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) constraints. Given the challenge of acquiring instantaneous channel state information (iCSI) for LEO satellites, we exploit the geometrical and statistical characteristics of the satellite channel. To develop an efficient optimization algorithm, semidefinite relaxation (SDR), sequential rank-1 constraint relaxation (SROCR), and successive convex approximation (SCA) are utilized. Numerical results show that the proposed framework efficiently performs both communication and radar, demonstrating superior interference control capabilities. Furthermore, it is validated that the common stream plays three vital roles: i) beamforming towards the radar target, ii) interference management between communications and radar, and iii) interference management among communication users.

cs.IT↗