Towards Efficient LEO-Constellation Design for Regional PNT Services
Abstract
The growing availability of low-cost positioning technologies enables broader access to advanced Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) services for regional and global applications. Building on our previous work, which introduced a Low Earth Orbit (LEO)–PNT optimization framework for Africa, we extend this framework to the European and Arctic region and demonstrate that well-designed regional constella tions with only 65-85 satellites can match the performance of much larger LEO-PNT systems, such as those comprising 240 282 satellites. We evaluate both regional and global LEO-PNT performance in outdoor and indoor environments for several constellations: three newly designed configurations optimized for European coverage, a previously optimized African constellation, and seven benchmark constellations.
Keywords
Constellation Optimization, Coverage, Carrier-to-Noise Ratio, Dilution of Precision (DOP), Indoor-Outdoor Scenarios, LEO-PNT
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
E. Lohan, K. Celikbilek and O. Cramariuc, "Towards Efficient LEO-Constellation Design for Regional PNT Services," in Journal of Communications Software and Systems, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 73-84, March 2026, doi: https://doi.org/10.24138/jcomss-2025-0291
@article{lohan2026towardsefficient,
author = {Elena Simona Lohan and Kaan Celikbilek and Oana Cramariuc},
title = {Towards Efficient LEO-Constellation Design for Regional PNT Services},
journal = {Journal of Communications Software and Systems},
month = {3},
year = {2026},
volume = {22},
number = {1},
pages = {73--84},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.24138/jcomss-2025-0291},
url = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.24138/jcomss-2025-0291}
}