PMSat: Optimizing Passive Metasurface for Low Earth Orbit Satellite Communication

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication is essential for wireless communication. While manufacturing and launching LEO satellites have become efficient and cost-effective, ground stations remain expensive due to complex designs for handling severe path losses and precise beam tracking. Hence, it is important to develop low cost and high-performance ground stations for widespread adoption of LEO satellite communication. Towards realizing this goal, we design a passive metasurface-enhanced LEO ground station system, named PMSat, combining metasurface’s fine-grained beamforming capability with a small-size phased array’s adaptive steering and focusing. For uplink, we jointly optimize the phase array codebook and uplink metasurface phase profile, and realize electronic steering by switching the codeword. We further jointly optimize the downlink metasurface phase profile to improve the focusing performance and enhance the received signal strength (RSS) over a wide range of incident angles. Our PMSat prototype consists of a single passive metasurface with 21 × 21 elements for uplink and 22 × 22 for downlink, along with 1 × 4 receiving and 1 × 4 transmitting phased array antennas. The effectiveness of our proposed PMSat is validated through extensive experiments, and results demonstrate that the optimized metasurface improves the SNR by 8.32 dB and 16.57 dB for uplink and downlink, respectively.