Joint Beam Placement and Load Balancing Optimization for Non-Geostationary Satellite Systems

Non-geostationary (Non-GSO) satellite constellations have emerged as a promising solution to enable ubiquitous high-speed low-latency broadband services by generating multiple spot-beams placed on the ground according to the user locations. However, there is an inherent trade-off between the number of active beams and the complexity of generating a large number of beams. This paper formulates and solves a joint beam placement and load balancing problem to carefully optimize the satellite beam and enhance the link budgets with a minimal number of active beams. We propose a two-stage algorithm design to overcome the combinatorial structure of the considered optimization problem providing a solution in polynomial time. The first stage minimizes the number of active beams, while the second stage performs a load balancing to distribute users in the coverage area of the active beams. Numerical results confirm the benefits of the proposed methodology both in carrier-to-noise ratio and multiplexed users per beam over other benchmarks.