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An integrated space-terrestrial network based on the ultradense low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite constellations has been envisioned in both 5G and beyond 5G (B5G) networks. This approach is a powerful solution to some key challenges from Internet of Things (IoT) services, such as the lack of link capacity to deal with large data transfer or coverage in the remote areas. This article focuses on the beamforming design for the transmissions from multiple LEO satellites, equipped with massive phased array antenna, to a large number of heterogeneous terrestrial terminals. Superposition coding-based beamforming is efficient in dealing with the receiver heterogeneity, but at the cost of higher computational complexity. Based on the dual decomposition theory as well as deep neural networks (DNNs), this article proposes to combine the nonlinear approximation ability of DNNs with distributed algorithms. This combination not only supports advanced nonorthogonal beamforming algorithms for achieving superior throughput performance, but also keeps the overall computational complexity low and enables the beamforming process to be speed up dramatically through parallel computing.
Shi et al. (Fri,) studied this question.