LEO Internet Satellite Constellation Design for Regional Civil Aviation Airways With Multiple Repeat Ground Tracks

The lack of Internet access significantly impacts the passenger experience on commercial airlines, necessitating reliable, high-throughput communication support. One promising solution is leveraging the satellite constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO). This article studies the design of an Internet satellite constellation in LEO for continuous communication coverage of regional airway targets. To address the problem, multiple repeat ground tracks (RGT) with the same period ratio are used as the reference. A mixed-integer simultaneous orbit optimization and satellite deployment model is established to minimize the number of satellites while satisfying the coverage requirement. A two-stage optimization framework is proposed to solve the problem with nonlinear and nonconvex constraints. In the first stage, differential evolution optimizes the parameters of each RGT orbit by minimizing the lower bound of the multiRGT orbit satellite deployment model. By leveraging the result in the first stage, the access profile is obtained, and the optimal satellite deployment result is derived in the second stage. Finally, detailed validation and comparison simulations are conducted based on three case studies to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model and algorithm.