Channel Aging-Aware LSTM-Based Channel Prediction for Satellite Communications

Satellite communication systems encounter channel aging issues due to the substantial distance that separates users and satellites. In such systems, the estimated channel state at a given time slot reflects the channel state from several time slots in the past. This letter proposes a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based architecture for channel prediction to mitigate the channel aging problem. The proposed scheme predicts the next time slot’s channel based on a block of estimated channel state information (CSI) from previous time slots. We consider the effect of channel aging in the training phase so that channel prediction in the testing phase is performed based on available data. We demonstrated through simulation experiments on new radio non-terrestrial network tapped delay line (NR NTN TDL) channel models, that our proposed scheme can effectively mitigate channel aging, and that it performs better than outdated channels. The proposed scheme improves the reliability and efficiency of satellite communication systems with long propagation delays.