NOMA-Enabled Multi-Beam Satellite Systems: Joint Optimization to Overcome Offered-Requested Data Mismatches

TL;DR

This paper proposes a joint optimization framework for NOMA-enabled multi-beam satellite systems to address data rate mismatches, improving fairness and performance using a novel metric and iterative algorithms.

Contribution

It introduces a new optimization approach for satellite-NOMA systems, jointly optimizing power, decoding order, and terminal assignment to enhance data fairness.

Findings

Max-min OCTR improves fairness among terminals.

Proposed algorithms achieve 40.2% improvement over OMA.

Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the optimization framework.

Abstract

Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) has potentials to improve the performance of multi-beam satellite systems. The performance optimization in satellite-NOMA systems can be different from that in terrestrial-NOMA systems, e.g., considering distinctive channel models, performance metrics, power constraints, and limited flexibility in resource management. In this paper, we adopt a metric, Offered Capacity to requested Traffic Ratio (OCTR), to measure the requested-offered data (or rate) mismatch in multi-beam satellite systems. In the considered system, NOMA is applied to mitigate intra-beam interference while precoding is implemented to reduce inter-beam interference. We jointly optimize power, decoding orders, and terminal-timeslot assignment to improve the max-min fairness of OCTR. The problem is inherently difficult due to the presence of combinatorial and non-convex aspects. We first fix the terminal-timeslot assignment, and develop an optimal fast-convergence algorithmic framework based on Perron-Frobenius theory (PF) for the remaining joint power-allocation and decoding-order optimization problem. Under this framework, we propose a heuristic algorithm for the original problem, which iteratively updates the terminal-timeslot assignment and improves the overall OCTR performance. Numerical results verify that max-min OCTR is a suitable metric to address the mismatch issue, and is able to improve the fairness among terminals. In average, the proposed algorithm improves the max-min OCTR by 40.2% over Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA).