A Practical Approach for SNR-Based Subchannel Allocation Considering Inter-Beam Interference in a Satellite Communication System

With the recent increase in the demand for satellite communications, the research efforts on resource allocation using a digital channelizer aim to improve the utilization efficiency of the limited frequency resources. However, the conventional resource allocation methods using a digital channelizer focus on almost completely avoiding inter-beam interference between adjacent beams, which results in the problem that the amount of over- or under-allocated resources does not decrease depending on the traffic demand distribution. In addition, in situations where the Global Positioning System (GPS) information of ground terminals is difficult to use from the viewpoint of security and privacy, it is unrealistic to accurately identify ground terminal location. Thus, we propose a practical approach for subchannel allocation based on the expected interference power of ground terminals calculated on the basis of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) information as a new alternative to GPS information from ground terminals. The simulation results show that the proposed approach achieves a higher traffic capacity ratio than the conventional resource allocation method for all possible variations in the traffic demand distribution.