Fundamental Limits of Cooperative Integrated Sensing and Communications over Low-Earth Orbit THz Satellite Channels
Abstract
Terahertz inter-satellite links enable unprecedented sensing precision for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations, yet face fundamental bounds from hardware impairments, pointing errors, and network interference. We develop a Network Cram\'er-Rao Lower Bound (N-CRLB) framework incorporating dynamic topology, hardware quality factor , phase noise , and cooperative effects through recursive Fisher Information analysis. Our analysis reveals three key insights: (i) hardware and phase noise create power-independent performance ceilings () and floors (), with power-only scaling saturating above ; (ii) interference coefficients enable opportunistic sensing with demonstrated gains of 5.5~dB under specific conditions (65~dB processing gain, 50~dBi antennas); (iii) measurement correlations from shared timing references, when properly modeled, do not degrade performance and can provide common-mode rejection benefits compared to mismodeled independent-noise baselines. Sub-millimeter ranging requires co-optimized hardware (), oscillators (), and appropriate 3D geometry configurations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.19007,
title = {Fundamental Limits of Cooperative Integrated Sensing and Communications over Low-Earth Orbit THz Satellite Channels},
author = {Haofan Dong and Houtianfu Wang and Hanlin Cai and Ozgur B. Akan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.19007},
year = {2025}
}