System-Level Evaluation of Beam Hopping in NR-Based LEO Satellite Communication System

TL;DR

This paper evaluates a novel beam hopping scheme for NR-based LEO satellite systems, demonstrating significant performance improvements through system-level simulations considering traffic demands and interference.

Contribution

It introduces the first system-level evaluation of beam hopping in LEO satellite systems based on 3GPP NR protocols, optimizing beam scheduling and power control.

Findings

Significant performance gains over benchmark schemes.

Effective beam scheduling reduces interference and improves coverage.

Performance varies with frequency bands and traffic models.

Abstract

Satellite communication by leveraging the use of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites is expected to play an essential role in future communication systems through providing ubiquitous and continuous wireless connectivity. This thus has motivated the work in the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) to ensure the operation of fifth generation (5G) New Radio (NR) protocols for non-terrestrial network (NTN). In this paper, we consider a NR-based LEO satellite communication system, where satellites equipped with phased array antennas are employed to serve user equipments (UEs) on the ground. To reduce payload weight and meet the time-varying traffic demands of UEs, an efficient beam hopping scheme considering both the traffic demands and inter-beam interference is proposed to jointly schedule beams and satellite transmit power. Then based on NR protocols, we present the first system-level evaluations of beam hopping scheme in LEO satellite system under different operating frequency bands and traffic models. Simulation results indicate that significant performance gains can be achieved by the proposed beam hopping scheme, especially under the distance limit constraint that avoids scheduling adjacent beams simultaneously, as compared to benchmark schemes.