Carrier and Power Assignment for Flexible Broadband GEO Satellite Communications System

Current multi-beam GEO satellite systems operate under a limited frequency reuse configuration and considering uniform power assignment across beams. The latter has been shown to be inefficient in matching the geographic distribution of the traffic demand. In this context, next generation of broadband GEO satellite systems will be equipped with more flexible and reconfigurable payloads, facilitating on-demand resource allocation. In this paper, we consider both carrier and power assignment to match the requested beam demands while minimizing the total transmit power and the total utilized bandwidth. A novel optimization problem is formulated and, given its non-convex structure, we divide the problem into two tractable sub-problems. First, we estimate the number of adjacent frequency carriers required for each beam to satisfy its demand and, subsequently, we optimize the power allocation based on the previously assigned carriers. We validate the proposed method with extensive numerical results, which demonstrate its efficiency with respect to benchmark strategies.