Traffic Aggregation-based QoS-sensitive Scheduling for Beam Hopping Satellite Systems

Beam hopping is a promising technique for flexible arranging resources to satisfy the heterogeneous user demands that vary in time and geography. Classical packet scheduling for quality of service (QoS) guarantee in beam hopping systems faces the problem of slot waste. In this paper, we formulate the packet scheduling as an optimization problem and theoretically analyze the influence of slot waste on system capability. Then we propose the traffic aggregation-based QoS-sensitive scheduling (TAQS) algorithm. TAQS schedules packets with the perception of QoS requirements and user states, and applies a novel traffic aggregation mechanism to improve slot utilization. Numerical results show that TAQS outperforms conventional algorithms in terms of QoS guarantee and scheduling fairness, achieving a remarkable system throughput promotion of over 28%.