Max-min fair joint precoding for multibeam satellite communication systems

Multibeam satellite communication systems (MSC-Ss) have been applied to provide efficiently power and bandwidth utilization for broadband service by employing frequency reuse. However, bandwidth for each beam is divied by frequency reuse which is used to mitigate the adjacent beam interference. Recently researchers resorted precoding as a novel interference mitigation technique to achieve full frequency reuse and shows great potential in the MSCSs, while one terminal is assumed to be served per beam for each time slot. This paper proposes a hybrid full frequency joint precoding for multiple terminals being served per beam for each time slot by considering characteristics of conventional frequency reuse and full frequency (FF) precoding. Terminal fairness is important for the performance of MSCSs. Thus we investigate the max-min fairness as the optimal objective for the power limited MSCSs which means maximizing the worst signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of terminals. The max-min fair problem is conversed to a convex optimization problem and solved by the semidefinite programming (SDP) algorithm. Finally, simulations quantify performance of the proposed scheme, and indicate intra-beam frequency reuse of HFF and allowable interference threshold affect the system performance.