Resource Allocation for Beam-Hopping-Based Satellite Systems With Spectrum Sharing

With the dense deployment of the satellite constellations, spectrum sharing among multiple satellite communication systems is a feasible way to alleviate the scarcity of spectrum resources. In order to improve the spectrum efficiency, we investigate the resource allocation in the spectrum sharing scenario of multiple beam-hopping (BH)-based satellite systems. The BH technology enhances the scheduling flexibility and the reusability of the transmission resources, but it also makes the inter-system interference more complicated. Under the interference constraint, the resource allocation problem is formulated to maximize the throughput of the satellite system. Based on the set of feasible beam allocation patterns, the optimization problem is reformulated as a mixed integer linear programming problem to obtain the optimal solution. A greedy suboptimal algorithm is also proposed to solve the problem with low complexity. To further accelerate the resource allocation process, the inter-beam distance threshold is introduced to reduce the number of feasible beam allocation patterns. Simulation results show that the proposed resource allocation algorithms achieve higher system throughput and better adaptability to the uneven distribution of traffic demands. It is also shown that the suboptimal algorithm achieves desirable performance with lower computational complexity, which is more attractive for the real-time resource allocation in the satellite systems.