Adaptive beam allocation for multimedia Ka-band satellite networks

Field trials have demonstrated that the demand for broadband multimedia services can be addressed by multibeam satellite communications at the Ka band (30/20 GHz) and beyond. Design of beam coverage areas for the broadband multimedia satellite systems must address the need to support an inhomogeneous spatial and temporal user distribution as well as a wide range of quality of service requirements. While dynamic allocation of satellite capacity enhances the network efficiency of a conventional satellite system, the achievable throughput and the flexibility of resource management are both constrained by the fixed beam geometry. We propose an adaptive beam allocation algorithm which tunes the shape of the satellite beams to reflect user distribution. When power is constrained and the user population is homogenous with respect to their quality of service requirement, experimental results show that the adaptive allocation, compared to the traditional uniform beam allocation, enhances the efficiency of satellite resource utilization by enabling a larger average number of users to transmit without degrading average user throughput.