Joint Beam Scheduling and Power Optimization for Beam Hopping LEO Satellite Systems

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications can provide ubiquitous and reliable services, making it an essential part of the Internet of Everything network. Beam hopping (BH) is an emerging technology for effectively addressing the issue of low resource utilization caused by the non-uniform spatio-temporal distribution of traffic demands. However, how to allocate multi-dimensional resources in a timely and efficient way for the highly dynamic LEO satellite systems remains a challenge. This paper proposes a joint beam scheduling and power optimization beam hopping (JBSPO-BH) algorithm considering the differences in the geographic distribution of sink nodes. The JBSPO-BH algorithm decouples the original problem into two sub-problems. The beam scheduling problem is modelled as a potential game, and the Nash equilibrium (NE) point is obtained as the beam scheduling strategy. Moreover, the penalty function interior point method is applied to optimize the power allocation. Simulation results show that the JBSPO-BH algorithm has low time complexity and fast convergence and achieves better performance both in throughput and fairness. Compared with greedy-based BH, greedy-based BH with the power optimization, round-robin BH, Max-SINR BH and satellite resource allocation algorithm, the throughput of the proposed algorithm is improved by 44.99%, 20.79%, 156.06%, 15.39% and 8.17%, respectively.