A Threshold-Free Random Access Preamble Detection Method Based on Joint Clustering for 6G NTN

Thanks to its irreplaceable superiority in providing seamless coverage, satellite communication is expected to play an important role in supporting ubiquitous and continuous connectivity services for 6G wireless networks. With the pre-compensation of timing and frequency offset, we propose a novel random access (RA) preamble detection method for the high-dynamic non-terrestrial networks (NTN). Unlike the conventional threshold-based methods, the proposed method leverages a joint clustering algorithm to accurately capture the timing position corresponding to the first arrival path without noise variance estimation. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in a typical satellite non line-of-sight (NLOS) scenario, and indicate that our method can achieve a notable performance enhancement in terms of the error detection probability (EDP) and the timing mean square error (MSE), in comparison to the exiting methods.