Sky visibility analysis under urban networks: A stochastic geometry approach

Abstract

We propose a novel framework to analyze a ground user’s sky visibility in an urban outdoor network. In order to measure the user’s sky visibility, the point process theory is used to represent buildings of urban outdoor networks. We characterize the line-of-sight (LoS) probability between the ground user and a non-terrestrial network node such as a low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite. Then, we quantify how many satellites are observable by the user. This provides intuition for cell planning by answering how many satellites are needed for a ground user without discontinuity of network services. Our analysis is cross-validated by numerical experiments.