A Cooperative NOMA-Aided Multi-Dimensional Beam Hopping Method in Satellite Communication Systems.

Beam hopping has been widely considered in multibeam satellite communication systems to meet the time-varying requirement of different cells. To mitigate the interbeam interference, adjacent beams are usually allocated in orthogonal frequency band or illuminated in different time-slots. However, this strategy cannot fully exploit the resource on satellites. In this paper, by using non-orthogonal multiple access between adjacent beams, we propose a multi-dimensional beam hopping approach where the beam pattern is designed in transmission, time, and space dimension. In order to improve the resource utilization of the satellite, a two-step optimization scheme is further studied in detail. Simulation results show that the novel approach is capable of achieving better performance on the aspect of system capacity.