An efficient beam scheduling policy in satellite communication system

In satellite communication systems nowadays, due to the conflict between the limited satellite payload and the unlimited increasing covering area, the beam sharing among dozens of cells is more and more common. For different cells, their different covering duration leads to different suspending delay. The average delay fairness calls for the efficient beam scheduling (BS). This issue involves the temporal and spatial resource allocation, i.e. which cell should occupy the active beam, and for how long. In this paper, we jointly consider the packet arrival rate, the channel attenuation and the backlog information to achieve the delay fairness among all the cells. A period-slot scheduling model is proposed, and two critical scheduling variables are obtained in a closed form by employing Stochastic Approximation Algorithm (SAA). Moreover, our simulations show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the existing works in fairness under the same throughput level.