No Arabic abstract
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes are being considered in 5G new radio developments and beyond. Although seminal papers demonstrated that NOMA outperforms orthogonal access in terms of capacity and user fairness, the majority of works have been devoted to the wireless terrestrial arena. Therefore, it is worth to study how NOMA can be implemented in other types of communications, as for instance the satellite ones, which are also part of the 5G infrastructure. Although communications through a satellite present a different architecture than those in the wireless terrestrial links, NOMA can be an important asset to improve their performance. This article introduces a general overview of how NOMA can be applied to this different architecture. A novel taxonomy is presented based on different multibeam transmission schemes and guidelines that open new avenues for research in this topic are provided.
Assume that a multibeam satellite communication system is designed from scratch to serve a particular area with maximal resource utilization and to satisfactorily accommodate the expected traffic demand. The main design challenge here is setting optimal system parameters such as number of serving beams, beam directions and sizes, and transmit power. This paper aims at developing a tool, multibeam satellite traffic simulator, that helps addressing these fundamental challenges, and more importantly, provides an understanding to the spatial-temporal traffic pattern of satellite networks in large-scale environments. Specifically, traffic demand distribution is investigated by processing credible datasets included three major input categories of information: (i) population distribution for broadband Fixed Satellite Services (FSS), (ii) aeronautical satellite communications, and (iii) vessel distribution for maritime services. This traffic simulator combines this three-dimensional information in addition to time, locations of terminals, and traffic demand. Moreover, realistic satellite beam patterns have been considered in this work, and thus, an algorithm has been proposed to delimit the coverage boundaries of each satellite beam, and then compute the heterogeneous traffic demand at the footprint of each beam. Furthermore, another algorithm has been developed to capture the inherent attributes of satellite channels and the effects of multibeam interference. Data-driven modeling for satellite traffic is crucial nowadays to design innovative communication systems, e.g., precoding and beam hopping, and to devise efficient resource management algorithms.
Spectrum monitoring and interference detection are crucial for the satellite service performance and the revenue of SatCom operators. Interference is one of the major causes of service degradation and deficient operational efficiency. Moreover, the satellite spectrum is becoming more crowded, as more satellites are being launched for different applications. This increases the risk of interference, which causes anomalies in the received signal, and mandates the adoption of techniques that can enable the automatic and real-time detection of such anomalies as a first step towards interference mitigation and suppression. In this paper, we present a Machine Learning (ML)-based approach able to guarantee a real-time and automatic detection of both short-term and long-term interference in the spectrum of the received signal at the base station. The proposed approach can localize the interference both in time and in frequency and is universally applicable across a discrete set of different signal spectra. We present experimental results obtained by applying our method to real spectrum data from the Swedish Space Corporation. We also compare our ML-based approach to a model-based approach applied to the same spectrum data and used as a realistic baseline. Experimental results show that our method is a more reliable interference detector.
Precoding has stood out as a promising multi-user transmission technique to meet the emerging throughput demand of satellite communication systems while awaiting the technological maturity for exploiting higher bands. Precoding enables the reduction of interference among co-channel beams through spatial processing while promoting aggressive frequency reuse and improving spectral efficiency. Satellite systems offer multitude of system and service configurations, resulting in different precoder design methodologies. This article explores the motivation for the introduction of precoding, offers an insight to their theoretical development in a diverse scenarios and presents some avenues for future development.
Visible light communication (VLC) is an emerging technology that enables broadband data rates using the visible spectrum. In this paper, considering slow beam steering where VLC beam directions are assumed to be fixed during a transmission frame, we find the steering angles that simultaneously serve multiple users within the frame duration and maximize the data rates. This is achieved by solving a non-convex optimization problem using a grid-based search and majorization-minimization (MM) procedure. Subsequently, we consider multiple steerable beams with a larger number of users in the network and propose an algorithm to cluster users and serve each cluster with a separate beam. We optimize the transmit power of each beam to maximize the data rates. Finally, we propose a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme for the beam steering and user clustering scenario, to further increase the data rates of the users. The simulation results show that the proposed beam steering method can efficiently serve a high number of users, and with power optimization, a data rate gain up to ten times is possible. The simulation results for NOMA suggests an additional 10 Mbps sum rate gain for each NOMA user pair.
Next-generation of satellite communication (SatCom) networks are expected to support extremely high data rates for a seamless integration into future large satellite-terrestrial networks. In view of the coming spectral limitations, the main challenge is to reduce the cost per bit, which can only be achieved by enhancing the spectral efficiency. In addition, the capability to quickly and flexibly assign radio resources according to the traffic demand distribution has become a must for future multibeam broadband satellite systems. This article presents the radio resource management problems encountered in the design of future broadband SatComs and provides a comprehensive overview of the available techniques to address such challenges. Firstly, we focus on the demand-matching formulation of the power and bandwidth assignment. Secondly, we present the scheduling design in practical multibeam satellite systems. Finally, a number of future challenges and the respective open research topics are described.