Dealing with Non-Uniform Demands in Flexible GEO Satellites: The Carrier Aggregation Perspective

To handle the increased broadband demand, commercial satellite operators are investing in advanced technology and intelligent solutions featuring smart payloads paving the way for satellites with a higher level of flexibility to efficiently support peaks in demand. This paper focuses on the optimization of the limited satellite frequency resources by considering the emerging Carrier Aggregation (CA) technique. Focusing on a multibeam multi-carrier GEO satellite system, we propose a CA design targeting a fair user-demand satisfaction across the system and we study two potential use-cases, namely the intra-beam CA (aggregation of carriers within a beam) and the inter-beam CA (aggregation of carriers across beams). The performance analysis demonstrates the benefits of CA in enhancing the peak data rate of satellite users as well as in improving the overall satellite resource utilization.