Link Budget Analysis for LEO Satellites Based on the Statistics of the Elevation Angle

Link budgets are widely applied to evaluate communication links for low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. However, approaches to calculate the received power from LEO satellites have followed similar procedures to those for Geostationary (GEO) satellites and other fixed distance wireless systems, ignoring the satellite mobility that causes continuous changes in the path length and in the elevation angle. Link budgets found in the literature for LEO communication systems have commonly opted to characterize the best and worst-cases of the received signal; however, this common approach tells little about how often those cases occur, and little can be inferred about the expected received power and its measures of dispersion. This article introduces an innovative methodology to evaluate LEO link budgets using the long term statistics and probabilities of occurrence of the elevation angle, which is characterized in this work through a random variable. This characterization of the elevation angle through a random variable allows the calculation of the expected value of the received power, its standard deviation, quantiles, among other quantities. The received power is essential to calculate other link indicators such as the carrier-to-noise ratio (C/N), and with the proposed methodology it can be now calculated considering the path length and elevation angle variability that occur for LEO satellites.