Carrier and Power Assignment for Flexible Broadband GEO Satellite Communications System

Current multi-beam GEO satellite systems operate
under a limited frequency reuse configuration and considering
uniform power assignment across beams. The latter has been
shown to be inefficient in matching the geographic distribution
of the traffic demand. In this context, next generation
of broadband GEO satellite systems will be equipped with
more flexible and reconfigurable payloads, facilitating on-demand
resource allocation. In this paper, we consider both carrier
and power assignment to match the requested beam demands
while minimizing the total transmit power and the total utilized
bandwidth. A novel optimization problem is formulated and,
given its non-convex structure, we divide the problem into two
tractable sub-problems. First, we estimate the number of adjacent
frequency carriers required for each beam to satisfy its demand
and, subsequently, we optimize the power allocation based on the
previously assigned carriers. We validate the proposed method
with extensive numerical results, which demonstrate its efficiency
with respect to benchmark strategies.