Providing satellite direct-to-cell (D2C) connectivity to common terrestrial devices, such as smartphones, requires large physical antenna apertures in low Earth orbit (LEO) operating at UHF/L/S frequency bands. This entails complex solutions for the construction, management and deployment of large monolithic satellites. This paper continues the authors’ work on innovative distributed implementations of the space segment. A large direct radiating array (DRA) hosted in the payload of a deployable monolithic satellite is divided into a swarm of multiple platforms, each hosting a subset of the radiating elements. Distributed implementations reduce the mechanical and technological requirements of large satellites, improve frequency reuse by creating larger virtual antenna apertures, and increase the resilience of the system. Nevertheless, they introduce new challenges, especially regarding the coordination of multiple platforms. In order to improve the short-term feasibility of the proposed architecture, the present work focuses on swarms with a small number of platforms. Radiation patterns of a large monolithic DRA are compared with different swarm designs. The results show that the main problem of virtual antenna apertures, grating lobes (GLs), can be mitigated by taking advantage of the degrees of freedom offered by the proposed satellite swarm solution, even when considering a small number of platforms.    «

Providing satellite direct-to-cell (D2C) connectivity to common terrestrial devices, such as smartphones, requires large physical antenna apertures in low Earth orbit (LEO) operating at UHF/L/S frequency bands. This entails complex solutions for the construction, management and deployment of large monolithic satellites. This paper continues the authors’ work on innovative distributed implementations of the space segment. A large direct radiating array (DRA) hosted in the payload of a deployable...    »