Angle-Based Multicast User Selection and Precoding for Beam-Hopping Satellite Systems

This paper deals with user selection, beam selection, and multicast precoding with full frequency reuse (FFR) for LEO satellite communication systems while exploiting the angle information defined by elevation and azimuth instead of the channel state information (CSI). LEO satellites employ large-scale phased array antennas (PAAs) that accommodate flexible networks, which makes it challenging to accomplish these stages via conventional CSI-based approaches due to their high complexity. This motivates us to propose a low-complexity method based on angle information. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the joint effect of user selection, beam selection, and precoding. According to simulation results, the proposed angle-based approaches achieve similar performance to the CSI-based one. The robustness performance supports the feasibility of this angle-based system.