Traffic-based dynamic beam coverage adjustment in satellite mobile communication

Current satellite coverage architectures generally assumes uniform traffic distribution among all beams, giving rise to uniform beam coverage pattern along with equal beam bandwidth allocation. However, the uniform coverage is not suitable for the unbalanced traffic scenarios, e.g. the metropolis region and emergency communication during disaster, which is characterized by the fact that there is single hot spot serving the majority of users, while the surrounding beams carry relatively light traffic. In this paper, we propose a dynamic coverage adjustment scheme that changes beam size and resource allocation according to the spatial distribution of user traffic. More resource is offered to the beam covering the hot spot, whereas basic coverage is maintained for the surrounding area. Further, we introduce the resource allocation policy and implement issues for proposal realization. Numeric results show considerable performance enhancement is brought by our scheme under diverse user distributions, especially for low earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems.