Enabling Full-Duplex LEO Satellite Systems with Non-Reciprocal BD-RIS-Assisted Beamforming

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites are a promising technology for providing low-latency, high-data-rate, and wide-coverage communication services. However, with growing demand for data transmission, future non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) require high spectral efficiency especially with low-gain antennas at the ground devices. This motivates the adoption of in-band full-duplex (FD) systems. In addition, the potential imbalance between downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) transmissions necessitates flexibility in resource allocation. To overcome these challenges, we propose an FD LEO satellite system, where the non-reciprocal beyond-diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (NR-BD-RIS) and multiple transmit and receive antennas are attached to the LEO satellite. NR-BD-RIS reflects the DL and UL signals by passive beamforming. By incorporating non-reciprocal components into the impedance network of RIS, the NR-BD-RIS breaks channel reciprocity, facilitating simultaneous support for multiple beam directions. To cover a wide coverage, we propose a time-sharing scheduling framework in which the NR-BD-RIS simultaneously serves multiple DL and multiple UL ground devices within each time slot. An optimization problem is defined to maximize the weighted sum-rate over the entire scheduling period. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed NR-BD-RIS significantly performs better than both conventional BD-RIS and diagonal RIS (D-RIS) with respect to DL and UL sum-rate performance under both single-user (SU) and multiple-user (MU) cases. Additionally, NR-BD-RIS requires less frequent reconfiguration compared to the other two types of RIS, making it more practical for implementation.