Downlink and Uplink Low Earth Orbit Satellite Backhaul for Airborne Networks

Providing backhaul access for airborne networks ensures their seamless connectivity to other aerial or terrestrial users with sufficient data rate. The backhaul for aerial platforms (APs) has been mostly provided through geostationary Earth orbit satellites and the terrestrial base stations (BSs). However, the former limits the achievable throughput due to significant path loss and latency, and the latter is unable to provide full sky coverage due to existence of wide under-served regions on Earth. Therefore, the emerging low Earth orbit (LEO) Internet constellations have the potential to address this problem by providing a thorough coverage for APs with higher data rate and lower latency. In this paper, we analyze the coverage probability and data rate of a LEO backhaul network for an AP located at an arbitrary altitude above the ground. The satellites' locality is modeled as a nonhomogeneous Poisson point process which not only enables tractable analysis by utilizing the tools from stochastic geometry, but also considers the latitude-dependent density of satellites. To demonstrate a compromise on the backhaul network's selection for the airborne network, we also compare the aforementioned setup with a reference terrestrial backhaul network, where AP directly connects to the ground BSs. Based on the numerical results, we can conclude that, for low BS densities, LEO satellites provide a better backhaul connection, which improves by increasing the AP's altitude.