Study on a user terminal-assisted beam pointing measurement algorithm for very high-throughput satellite systems

High-throughput satellites play an important role in emergency disaster relief, maritime, and other fields. A new generation of high-throughput satellites with large deployable antennas and broadband beamforming networks, namely, very high-throughput satellites (VHTS), is developing towards hundreds, even thousands of extremely narrow beams with Tbps capacity, which puts forward higher requirements for satellite pointing and system construction costs. In order to solve the problem that those traditional beam pointing measurement and calibration algorithms are difficult to apply or the performance is limited, this paper builds a service beam pointing measurement and calibration architecture. A user terminal-assisted beam pointing measurement algorithm based on the Gauss-Newton method is proposed for the general case, which can effectively reduce the construction cost of onboard and ground pointing measurement system, and improve the measurement accuracies of three axes of the satellite. Simulation results demonstrate the excellent performance under the ideal scenario. To achieve the future engineering application under the non-ideal scenario, the terminal positioning error can be first neglected, then the pattern processing error and the terminal signal measurement error must be reduced by decreasing the pattern sampling interval, increasing the number of participant terminals, and other means. By comparing with a traditional beam pointing measurement algorithm, the proposed algorithm can achieve much lower beam pointing error than the baseline.