Heuristic Radio Resource Management for Massive MIMO in Satellite Broadband Communication Networks

The advent of technologies allowing the implementation of flexible satellite payloads is opening up great opportunities to efficiently cope with non-uniform traffic conditions. The latter is one of the “crux” of modern satellite broadband access service economic provision. In this paper we derive affordable (linear) complexity radio resource management (RRM) techniques for satellite multi-beam broadband communication networks that are closely approaching the optimum solution which has an exponential complexity with the number of users. The proposed heuristic RRM solution is applied to the most demanding Massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (M-MIMO) case. It is shown that the low-complexity payload pragmatic M-MIMO solution combined with heuristic RRM is able to efficiently cope with very different traffic conditions with a small penalty in terms of throughput compared to the much more complex ideal Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) M-MIMO adopting the same RRM algorithm. Instead, the pragmatic M-MIMO with heuristic RRM is outperforming MMSE M-MIMO exploiting simple RRM.