Satellite multi-beam coverage analysis for handover rate reduction

From the literature, we know that regular hexagonal coverage is the optimal seamless coverage for terrestrial wireless network, i.e. cellular network [1], as it could achieve minimum handover rates compared with other seamless coverage like triangle coverage, rectangle coverage and etc [2][3][4]. However, different from the terrestrial wireless network, both the movements of user equipments (UEs) and access points (APs) could lead to handover in satellite communication network [5]. Thus regular hexagonal coverage is no longer the optimal multi-beam coverage mode for non-geostationary satellite to reduce handover rates. In this paper, we propose a multi-beam coverage scheme based on prolate hexagon coverage mode, analyze the impacts of shape parameters, the movements of satellite and UEs on handover rates, derive the arithmetic expression of handover rates and then give the optimal shape parameters. Through computer simulation, we validate our analysis.