Precoded Cluster Hopping in Multi-Beam High Throughput Satellite Systems

Beam-Hopping (BH) and precoding are two trending
technologies for the satellite community. While BH enables
flexibility to adapt the offered capacity to the heterogeneous
demand, precoding aims at boosting the spectral efficiency.
In this paper, we consider a high throughput satellite (HTS)
system that employs BH in conjunction with precoding. In
particular, we propose the concept of Cluster-Hopping (CH)
that seamlessly combines the BH and precoding paradigms and
utilizes their individual competencies. The cluster is defined as
a set of adjacent beams that are simultaneously illuminated. In
addition, we propose an efficient time-space illumination pattern
design, where we determine the set of clusters that can be
illuminated simultaneously at each hopping event along with the
illumination duration. We model the CH time-space illumination
pattern design as an integer programming problem which can
be efficiently solved. Supporting results based on numerical
simulations are provided which validate the effectiveness of the
proposed CH concept and time-space illumination pattern design.