Satellite Swarms for Direct-to-Cell Networks: A Distribution–Performance Tradeoff Analysis

Abstract

This work investigates 2D distributed satellite swarm configurations for direct-to-cell (D2C) applications. Unlike previous studies, which primarily considered swarms as deployment alternatives to monolithic arrays, this paper focuses on exploiting the increased spatial resolution enabled by large distributed apertures. Simulation results show that, for the considered scenarios, increasing the level of antenna distribution across satellite platforms enlarges the effective aperture and improves the system sum rate under ideal operating conditions. While gains are moderate for uniformly distributed users, they become particularly pronounced in scenarios including hotspot with high user densities. The results further show that user scheduling strategies do not invalidate the superiority of highly distributed configurations, as these architectures provide a more balanced rate distribution across the coverage area, including hotspot regions. In addition, the paper analyzes several key implementation challenges associated with large distributed swarms, including errors in inter-satellite relative positioning, synchronization impairments, and limited beamforming and user-position update rates. Although within the range of swarm configurations and scenarios considered in this work, performance gains continue to increase with aperture size, these practical constraints may restrict swarm sizes in the medium term. Nevertheless, the observed performance gains strongly motivate further research into scalable synchronization, positioning and data distribution techniques for future large-scale satellite swarms.