With numerous ongoing deployments owned by private companies and startups,
dense satellite constellations deployed in low Earth orbit (LEO) will play a
major role in the near future of wireless communications. In addition, the 3rd
Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has ongoing efforts to integrate
satellites into 5G and beyond-5G networks. Nevertheless, numerous challenges
must be overcome to fully exploit the connectivity capabilities of satellite
constellations. These challenges are mainly a consequence of the low
capabilities of individual small satellites, along with their high orbital
speeds and small coverage due to the low altitude of deployment. In particular,
inter-plane inter-satellite links (ISLs), which connect satellites from
different orbital planes, are greatly dynamic and may be considerably affected
by the Doppler shift. In this paper, we present a framework and the
corresponding algorithms for the dynamic establishment of the inter-plane ISLs
in LEO constellations. Our results show that the proposed algorithms increase
the sum of rates in the constellation 1) by up to 115% with respect to the
state-of-the-art benchmark schemes in an interference-free environment and 2)
by up to 71% when compared to random resource allocation in a worst-case
scenario for interference.Comment: To be published in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication
