Beam hopping in multi-beam broadband satellite systems: System simulation and performance comparison with non-hopped systems

A key requirement for the future multi-beam broadband satellite design is the provision of flexibility to adapt to different traffic demands by re-assigning capacity to beams in accordance with changing traffic distributions. Such flexibility would enable the best match to be maintained between the system resources and traffic demands over the satellite lifetime, thereby greatly enhancing the system utilisation and competitiveness. The current paper examines the use of beam hopping to provide such flexibility. It investigates the advantages of beam hopping and compares the performance and capacity capabilities of a beam hopped with that of equivalent non-hopped systems also designed to provide flexibility.