Flexible Resource Management in High-Throughput Satellite Communication Systems: A Two-Stage Machine Learning Framework

With digitization and globalization in the era of 5G and beyond, research on high-throughput satellites (HTS) to increase communication capacity and improve flexibility is becoming essential. To achieve efficient resource utilization and dynamic traffic demand matching, the multi-dimensional resource management (MDRM) problem of the HTS communication system has been studied in this paper. Since the MDRM problem is a non-convex mixed integer problem, we decompose it into two tractable sub-problems. First, the beam-domain resource configuration problem is formed to enable on-demand coverage. Next, the user-domain resource allocation problem is modeled to enable on-demand communication. Considering the two-domain optimization problem, a two-stage framework is developed based on the combination of self-supervised learning and deep reinforcement learning. Specifically, in the first stage, a maximum co-channel interference based self-supervised learning method is proposed to perform traffic demand matching through demand awareness. In the second stage, a soft frequency reuse based proximal policy optimization approach is presented to further increase the system capacity through interference coordination. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed two-stage algorithm outperforms the benchmark schemes in terms of spectrum efficiency and demand satisfaction.