Satellite Broadband Capacity-on-Demand: Dynamic Beam Illumination with Selective Precoding

Efficient satellite resource utilization is one of the key challenges in next generation high-throughput satellite communication system. In this context, dynamic coverage scheduling based on traffic demand has emerged as a promising solution, focusing system capacity into geographical areas where it is needed. Conventional Beam Hopping (BH) satellite system exploit the time-domain flexibility, which provides all available spectrum to a selected set of beams as long as they are not adjacent to each other. However, large geographical areas involving more than one adjacent beam may require full access to the available spectrum during particular instances of time. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a dynamic beam illumination scheme combined with selective precoding, where only sub-sets of beams that are subject to strong inter-beam interference are precoded. With selective precoding, complexity at the ground-segment is reduced and only considered when needed. Supporting results based on numerical simulations show that the proposed scheme outperforms the relevant benchmarks in terms of demand matching performance.