Impact of Scheduling in the Return-Link of Multi-Beam Satellite MIMO Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how scheduling strategies in multi-beam satellite MIMO systems' return-link affect user rates and resource utilization, proposing a bipartite graph-based algorithm to improve fairness and efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a bipartite graph-based scheduling algorithm for the return-link in multi-beam satellite systems, highlighting its impact on user rates and resource exploitation.

Findings

Free-slot assignment enhances resource utilization.

Scheduling improves max-min user rate fairness.

Trade-offs between efficiency and performance are analyzed.

Abstract

The utilization of universal frequency reuse in multi-beam satellite systems introduces a non-negligible level of co-channel interference (CCI), which in turn penalizes the quality of service experienced by users. Taking this as starting point, the paper focuses on resource management performed by the gateway (hub) on the return-link, with particular emphasis on a scheduling algorithm based on bipartite graph approach. The study gives important insights into the achievable per-user rate and the role played by the number of users and spot beams considered for scheduling. More interestingly, it is shown that a free-slot assignment strategy helps to exploit the available satellite resources, thus guaranteeing a max-min rate requirement to users. Remarks about the trade-off between efficiency-loss and performance increase are finally drawn at the end of the paper.