DEPLOYING JOINT BEAM HOPPING AND PRECODING IN MULTIBEAM SATELLITE NETWORKS WITH TIME VARIANT TRAFFIC

This paper studies the application of Beam Hopping (BH) as a key enabler to provide high level of flexibility to manage scarce on-board resources, particularly power, based on the irregular and time variant traffic requests/demands distributed within the coverage of a satellite multibeam system. However, while high throughput full frequency reuse pattern is employed among beams, the performance of BH is significantly degraded due to the generated inter-beam interference, and applying precoding is essential. In this context, we propose Joint Precoding and BH (J-PBH) in a multibeam system. The proposed J-PBH has the following functionality: serving beams follows an illumination pattern where at consecutive time instants high-demand beams are served more often than low-demand beams. Then, a Zero Forcing precoding is employed aiming at equalizing inter-beam interference. Consequently, the proposed J-PBH flexibly manage on-board power resources between high- and low-demand beams. Numerical simulations are presented which validate the proposed J-PBH benefits.