On Beam Hopping Pattern Design for Satellite Communication Systems With Hybrid Precoding

This correspondence studies the design of beam hopping (BH) pattern for satellite communication systems with hybrid analog-digital precoding. We investigate the transmit power minimization problem under rate constraints. The BH pattern is characterized by a matrix with binary entries with regular or irregular weights. Then, we propose Viterbi and greedy algorithm based methods to identify the optimized BH matrix, for regular and irregular BH patterns, respectively. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm with regular BH pattern outperforms the existing baseline method by 2.8 dB. Further, it is demonstrated that the proposed irregular BH pattern yields about 2 dB improvement over the regular pattern.