Abstract:This paper investigates energy-efficient inter-satellite communication in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) networks, where satellites exchange both buffered and newly generated data through half-duplex inter-satellite links (ISLs). Due to orbital motion and interference-prone directional asymmetry, the achievable ISL capacities in opposite directions vary dynamically, leading to inefficient utilization under conventional fixed or alternating duplex modes. To address this, we propose a Flexible Duplex (FlexD) scheme that adaptively selects the ISL transmission direction in each slot to maximize instantaneous end-to-end sky-to-ground throughput, jointly accounting for ISL quality, downlink conditions, and queue backlogs. A unified analytical framework is developed that transforms the bottleneck rate structure into an equivalent SINR domain, enabling closed-form derivations of throughput outage probability and energy efficiency under deterministic ISLs and Rician satellite-to-ground fading. The analysis reveals distinct operating regions governed by ISL and backlog constraints and provides tractable bounds for ergodic rate and energy efficiency. Numerical results confirm that FlexD achieves higher reliability and up to 30% improvement in energy efficiency compared with conventional half- and full-duplex schemes under realistic inter-satellite interference conditions.
Abstract:Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) have emerged as transformative technologies, enhancing spectral efficiency and improving interference management in multi-user cooperative communications. This paper investigates the integration of RIS with Flexible-Duplex (FlexD) communication, featuring dynamic scheduling capabilities, to mitigate unintended external interference in multi-user wireless networks. By leveraging the reconfigurability of RIS and dynamic scheduling, we propose a user-pair selection scheme to maximize system throughput when full channel state information (CSI) of interference is unavailable. We develop a mathematical framework to evaluate the throughput outage probability when RIS introduces spatial correlation. The derived analytical results are used for asymptotic analysis, providing insights into dynamic user scheduling under interference based on statistical channel knowledge. Finally, we compare FlexD with traditional Full Duplex (FD) and Half Duplex (HD) systems against RIS-assisted FlexD. Our results show FlexD's superior throughput enhancement, energy efficiency and data management capability in interference-affected networks, typical in current and next-generation cooperative wireless applications like cellular and vehicular communications.