Cluster-Based Beam Hopping for Energy Efficiency Maximization in Flexible Multibeam Satellite Systems

Beam hopping is an important time-domain resource scheduling scheme that aims for assigning different service time slots to beams and ensuring the provided capacities flexibly match the diverse demands. In this letter, we propose a cluster-based beam hopping approach combined with the precoding to maximize the energy efficiency of the system while achieving the on-demand capacity allocation. Furthermore, we devise a two-step algorithm based on an alternating optimization method to decompose the time-space illumination pattern design problem into two subproblems, which can be efficiently solved by convex approximation and integer programming, respectively. The numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve the on-demand capacity allocation and the energy efficiency is significantly improved.