Joint Power, Frequency and Precoding Optimisation in a Satellite SDMA Communication System

Abstract

State-of-the-art satellite processors include the capacity to offer full digital beamforming. Digital beamforming used jointly with an active antenna allows a full power, frequency and beamforming flexibility. This flexibility must be utilised with efficient and fast computing resource allocation algorithms, especially in a MEO use-case. As MEO satellites move with respect to Earth contrary to GEO satellites, they experience very diverse user distributions and must dynamically adapt the resources allocated to each user. This paper proposes an algorithm based on SDMA which leverages the payload flexibility with a joint power, frequency and beamforming optimisation. The algorithm provides a fair resource allocation to users, accounting for their respective required spectral efficiency.