Satellite Multi-Beam Collaborative Scheduling in Satellite Aviation Communications

Satellite communications play an indispensable role in serving aviation user. However, since the number of satellite beams is much less than the number of users, aviation users need to share beams by time division multiplexing when the number of users is large, which inevitably leads to the situation that the satellite frequently requires the user to report location information for beam scheduling so as to prevent users from deviating from the coverage of satellite beams. Frequent user location updates result in high interaction overhead between the satellite and aviation users. In such a case, how to free users from frequent location updates and realize low interaction overhead beam scheduling are the key in satellite aviation communications. To solve such a problem, we first propose a dynamic spatio-temporal approximation (DSTA) model to provide large spatial-temporal scale mobility tolerance for users within the time frame permitted by the satellite system, then a novel beam collaboration scheduling algorithm based on this new model is further proposed, aiming to realize low-overhead satellite multi-beam scheduling. Simulation results show that the proposed method with moderate complexity reduces interaction frequency and interaction overhead between the satellite and users by at least 56.9% and 47.1% compared with benchmark approaches respectively, which demonstrates the superiority of our proposed algorithm.