Learning to Optimize Satellite Flexible Payloads

This paper proposes an optimization technique for satellite systems with flexible payloads. Unlike current satellites whose per-beam capacity is fixed, forthcoming payloads will have bandwidth and power allocation reconfiguration capabilities allowing the operators to modify the offered capacity. Assuming a generic flexible payload architecture, this paper introduces an op-timization technique that is able to provide an efficient bandwidth and power allocation that fulfil the user terminals rate requests. Furthermore, we introduce a deep learning regression algorithm able to reproduce the mapping of the proposed optimization technique with a very reduced computational complexity. By using the output of the optimization technique as ground truth, we design a deep neural network that behaves very similar to the optimization problem yet with a dramatically reduced computational time. Numerical results show the benefits of the proposed technique and in particular, we observe two order of magnitude computational time decrease when using the deep learning approach compared to the classical optimization technique yet preserving almost the same performance.