Joint Power and Carrier Allocation for the Multibeam Satellite Downlink with Individual SINR Constraints

A novel multibeam satellite system design is proposed in this paper based on jointly optimizing power and carrier allocation in order to best match the asymmetric traffic requests. This design introduces higher and asymmetric interference levels throughout the coverage. However, both power and bandwidth will be used more efficiently. Even though the problem of power and bandwidth allocation has been addressed in terrestrial wireless communications, it is new in satellite systems and since architecture and channel are different, available results and algorithms are not applicable to satellite payload systems. In this paper we formulate the resource allocation problem as max-min SINR balancing based on the recently introduced axiomatic-based interference model, but in addition, we also optimize the carrier allocation when performing the SINR balancing problem. An analytical solution for the optimal carrier allocation is proposed and we iteratively find the optimal power allocation for each beam. The Shannon (upper bound) and current state-of-the art PHY layer technology: DVB-S2 are proposed to be implemented in order to obtain the gap between them. Simulation results show significant improvements in terms of power gain, spectral efficiency and traffic matching ratio comparing with conventional system, which is designed based on uniform bandwidth and power allocation.