Multi-layer beam architecture in mobile satellite communications

Since satellite communications have developed towards personal and mobile communication, they become indispensable portions in global communications. Transmission power and available frequency band are restricted by the satellite inherent characteristic. So, a new resource management strategy is required for satellite communications. Spot beam technique is widely adopted in satellite systems, building a overlapped beams architecture (OBA), with its frequency reuse just as in terrestrial cellulars, in which entire spectrum is orthogonally assigned to adjacent beams, leading to a relatively low spectrum utilization. In this paper, a new multi-layer beam architecture (MBA) is proposed. We analyze the system performance by calculating global reuse factor, system maximum achievable rate and blocking probability. Numerical results suggest that MBA outperforms the original OBA in the metrics above, making better utilization of frequency spectrum.