NOMA-Assisted Beam Hopping System Design for Airborne Platform Communication

This paper investigates the performance of nonorthogonal multiple access based high orbit satellite beam hopping (NOMA-BH) airborne platform communication systems. To satisfy the time-varying and non-uniform traffic requirement, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the achievable rate. With the intention of simplifying the problem's complexity, the original optimization problem is split to both power allocation and beam scheduling sub-problems which are solved by alternating optimization methods. The successive convex approximation method is employed for the power allocation sub-problem to solve non-convex constraints. The greedy algorithm based on equivalent channel gain is designed for the beam scheduling sub-problem to reduce computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed NOMA-BH scheme is able to effectively tackle dynamic traffic demands and significantly improve system spectral efficiency and user quality of service. Compared with conventional schemes, the joint optimization algorithm validates the significant advantages of NOMA-BH technologies.