Random Access Preamble Design and Detection for Mobile Satellite Communication Systems

Reasonable design and effective detection of the random access preamble has become a challenging task due to the unique characteristics of mobile satellite communications. To tackle this challenge, we first design a universal long sequence structure by concatenating multiple short Zadoff–Chu sequences that are insensitive to carrier frequency offset (CFO), and then propose the new principles of parameter selection for short sequences to ensure the minimum utilization of root sequence and the independence of the cyclic shift offset on the beam radius. To further reduce the detection complexity and improve the multi-user access performance, a fast timing detection approach is also presented by leveraging the piecewise cumulative detection and the multi-peaks joint estimation to obtain an accurate timing advance for each access user. Simulation results and complexity analysis validate the effectiveness of the new preamble in a typical satellite communication environment, and reveal that the proposed timing detection can achieve the robustness to CFO and offer outstanding performance improvements especially in multi-user scenarios while having a notably reduced computational complexity.