Optimization Method of Dynamic Beam Position for LEO Beam-Hopping Satellite Communication Systems

The beam-hopping (BH) technology applied to low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication networks is a superior choice, but the long transmission delay partly caused by data packets waiting in the queue of satellite transponders will seriously affect the user experience. To shorten the packet queueing delay, in this paper, we propose an optimization method of dynamic beam position division for LEO BH satellite communication systems. Firstly, we analyze the packet queueing delay problem in BH satellites to find out the factors related to the queueing delay, and we find that the number of beam positions is negatively correlated with the queueing delay. Then, we turn the beam position division problem into a
$p$
-center problem to try to cover all users with the least number of beam positions. The beam positions among the footprint of LEO satellites are determined dynamically by the user distribution and the traffic distribution. Finally, the performance evaluation of the proposed optimization method is carried out in real-time and the simulation shows that the beam position division optimized system we proposed can shorten the queueing delay up to 40% compare to the benchmark system without sacrificing throughput.