Efficient Content Caching for Delivery Time Minimization in the LEO Satellite Networks

Next-generation multi-spot beam satellite systems open a new way to design low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication systems with full flexibility in managing bandwidth, transmit power, and spot beam coverage, enabling the adoption of spatial multiplexing techniques to meet the unprecedented demand for future mobile traffic. However, conventional spatial multiplexing techniques perform poorly in satellite systems due to high correlation between the satellite channels, resulting in inefficient mitigation of inter-user interference. In this paper, we exploit the flexibility of multi-spot beam LEO satellites and consider the geographic distribution of users to improve the performance of LEO satellite-assisted edge caching systems. Our goal is to jointly optimize the beam coverage, bandwidth and transmit power and minimize the cache delivery time. In particular, the spot beam coverage is optimized by using the K-means algorithm applied to the realistic user demands, followed by a proposed successive convex approximation (SCA)-based iterative algorithm for optimizing the radio resources. Simulations shows that our optimal approach outperforms the conventional precoding-based approach and also shows a significant improvement in the minimization of the maximum content delivery time.