Abstract:
Low-Earth-orbit (LEO) mega-constellations promise truly global broadband connectivity, yet their ultimate capacity and latency remain open questions as deployments scale to tens of thousands of satellites. This presentation draws from two studies, offering modeling insights, optimization techniques, and designs for LEO networks. Our first study models downlink area spectral efficiency - measured in bits/s/Hz per square km of Earth surface - from low-frequency to millimeter-wave bands. We evaluate the spectral efficiencies assuming both mobile devices with omnidirectional antennas and user terminals with highly directional antennas. These findings highlight scalable strategies for maximizing throughput and guiding capacity planning for such constellations. The second study optimizes inter-satellite links via convex optimization, reducing network diameter to achieve sub-100 millisecond latencies across the globe by exploiting vacuum propagation's speed advantage over fiber. The presentation is based in part on joint work with Cuneyd Ozturk, Randy Berry, Michael Honig, Arman Mollakhani, Tom Tiamraj, and Shu-Jie Cao at Northwestern University.
Bio:
Dongning Guo received the Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University and joined Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, where he is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also serves as a Research Partner with SpectrumX, an NSF Spectrum Innovation Center, and the Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning (IDEAL) based in Chicago. His research spans wireless networks, blockchain and decentralization, and information theory. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2007), the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications (2010), the Best Paper Award from the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (2017), and the Bitcoin Research Prize (2023). He led teams that reached the final matches of the DARPA Spectrum Challenges in both 2014 and 2019. He has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, an Editor for Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory, and a Guest Editor for IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. He is a Fellow of IEEE.