Joint Satellite Power Consumption and Handover Optimization for LEO Constellations

TL;DR

This paper proposes an optimization method for satellite power allocation and handover management in LEO constellations, significantly improving user throughput while reducing handoff frequency.

Contribution

It introduces a joint optimization framework for power and handover management in LEO satellite systems, formulated as a mixed-integer concave linear program.

Findings

40% increase in user throughput

Effective control of handoff frequency

Outperforms naive closest-satellite association

Abstract

In satellite constellation-based communication systems, continuous user coverage requires frequent handoffs due to the dynamic topology induced by the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. Each handoff between a satellite and ground users introduces additional signaling and power consumption, which can become a significant burden as the size of the constellation continues to increase. This work focuses on the optimization of the total transmission rate in a LEO-to-user system, by jointly considering the total transmitted power, user-satellite associations, and power consumption, the latter being handled through a penalty on handoff events. We consider a system where LEO satellites serve users located in remote areas with no terrestrial connectivity, and formulate the power allocation problem as a mixed-integer concave linear program (MICP) subject to power and association constraints. Our approach can be solved with off-the-shelf solvers and is benchmarked against a naive baseline where users associate to their closest visible satellite. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in controlling the handoff frequency while maintaining high user throughput. These performance gains highlight the effectiveness of our handover-aware optimization strategy, which ensures that user rates improve significantly, by about 40%, without incurring a disproportionate rise in the handoff frequency.