Demand-Based Adaptive Multi-Beam Pattern and Footprint Planning for High Throughput GEO Satellite Systems

Abstract

The current broadband coverage area requisites and the expected user demand is satisfied by the state of the art satellite industry by using multiple spot beams of high throughput satellites with fixed multi-beam pattern and footprint planning. However, in recent years, new mobile broadband users with dynamic traffic demand are requesting for services in remote geographical locations such as air (aeroplanes) and water (ships). Furthermore, the expected demand varies with time and geographical location of the users. Hence, a practical approach to meet such heterogeneous demand is to plan adaptive beams to the satellites equipped with beamforming capabilities. In this paper, we study the state of the art fixed multi-beam pattern and footprint plan and show its drawbacks to support the non-uniformly distributed user terminals and varying traffic demands. To end this, we propose an adaptive multi-beam pattern and footprint plan where we design spot beams with flexible size and position based on the spatial clustering of the users in order to increase the flexibility of the high throughput satellite system. Numerical simulations demonstrate the high system performance of the proposed methodology.