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.
翻译:通过利用低地球轨道卫星的使用,卫星通信预计将通过提供无处不在的连续无线连接,在未来的通信系统中发挥重要作用,从而推动第三代伙伴关系项目(3GPP)的工作,以确保非地球网络第五代(5G)新无线电(NR)协议的运作。在本文件中,我们考虑以NR为基础的低地轨道卫星通信系统,在该系统中,配备分阶段阵列天线的卫星被用于为地面用户设备提供服务。降低有效载荷重量并满足电子导航系统时间变化的交通需求,考虑到交通需求和跨波干扰,拟议联合安排横梁跳车计划,以联合安排波束和卫星传输能力。然后,根据NR协议,我们介绍对低地轨道卫星系统不同操作频率波段和交通模型下的轮椅轮的第一次系统级评价。模拟结果表明,拟议的横置计划可以取得显著的性能收益,特别是在距离限制下,避免同时安排相邻的波束,与基准计划相比较。