Joint beam-hopping scheduling and power allocation in NOMA-assisted satellite systems

In this paper, we investigate potential synergies of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and beam hopping (BH) for multi-beam satellite systems. The coexistence of BH and NOMA provides time-power-domain flexibilities in mitigating a practical mismatch effect between offered capacity and requested traffic per beam. We formulate the joint BH scheduling and NOMA-based power allocation problem as mixed-integer non-convex programming. We reveal the exponential-conic structure for the original problem, and reformulate the problem to the format of mixed-integer conic programming (MICP), where the optimum can be obtained by exponential-complexity algorithms. A greedy scheme is proposed to solve the problem on a timeslot-by-timeslot basis with polynomial-time complexity. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed efficient suboptimal algorithm in reducing the matching error by 62.57% in average over the OMA scheme and achieving a good trade-off between computational complexity and performance compared to the optimal solution.