Hybrid Beamforming in Non-Terrestrial Networks: Architectures, Design Challenges, and Opportunities

Abstract

Hybrid analog-digital beamforming (HBF) has emerged as a key enabling technology for non-terrestrial networks (NTNs), where large antenna arrays are required to compensate for severe propagation loss but fully digital beamforming is often impractical due to radio-frequency (RF) chain cost, power consumption, and payload limitations. Compared with terrestrial networks, NTN platforms such as low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) impose distinctive HBF design challenges, including high mobility, Doppler effects, sparse line-of-sight-dominant channels, stringent on-board energy budgets, and, for UAVs, the additional coupling between beamforming and controllable platform placement or trajectory. This survey provides a systematic review of HBF techniques for NTN systems, with emphasis on LEO satellite and UAV communications. We first introduce common HBF architectures, signal models, channel representations, analog and digital precoder designs, and learning-aided approaches that form the shared technical foundation of existing works. We then survey both platforms under a common set of five categories, which cover system architecture and precoding design, time-varying beam management, network-level cooperation and scheduling, sensing capability and reconfigurable surfaces, and security and multiple access. Their platform-specific content differs most sharply in the second one, since the dominant time-varying mechanism is traffic-driven beam hopping on an LEO payload but mobility-aware beam tracking on a UAV. Finally, we discuss open research challenges and future directions toward scalable, robust, and hardware-efficient HBF in next-generation NTNs.