Radio resource management strategies for DVB-S2 systems operated with flexible satellite payloads

The increasing demand for high-rate broadcast and multicast services over satellite networks has pushed for the development of High Throughput Satellite (HTS) characterized by a large number of beams (e.g., more than 100). Moreover, the variable distribution of data traffic across beams and over time has called for the design of a new generation of satellite payloads, able to flexibly allocate bandwidth and power. In this context, this paper explores the technical challenges related to radio resource allocation in the forward link of multibeam satellite networks and proposes a strategy based on a modified version of the simulated annealing algorithm and a newly proposed objective function to meet as close as possible the requested traffic across the beams while taking fairness into account. Performance results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach and also shed some light on possible payload design implications.