RIS-Aided Hotspot Capacity Enhancement for Multibeam Satellite Systems

Full frequency reuse combined with precoding is a promising solution for multibeam satellite systems (MSSs) to meet the evergrowing capacity demand. However, line-of-sight-dominant satellite-ground channels will cause severe channel correlation among the geographically clustered hotspot users (HUs), which restricts multiuser capacity over HUs. In this paper, we propose the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided hotspot capacity enhancement scheme for MSSs. We formulate a hotspot sum rate maximization problem with SINR constraints added on a different user set and present an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm for its solution. To reduce computational complexity, we propose a two-stage algorithm that sequentially optimizes RIS phase shift with manifold optimization and satellite precoding, no longer resorting to AO. The RIS phase shift design utilizes semi-orthogonal subspace maximization and pairwise channel decorrelation. This design effectively formulates the interplay between RIS phase shifts and transmit beamforming related to the SINR constraint. To circumvent high channel estimation overhead, we extend the algorithms to low-cost designs exploiting statistical channel state information. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed RIS-aided MSS designs substantially enhance HUs’ sum rate, attributed to the RIS-enabled channel refinement mechanism. Moreover, the two-stage algorithm achieves a comparable performance to the AO-based algorithm.