LEO Satellite Constellation Design for Regional Coverage Based on Beam Hopping

In this paper, we design a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation for the demand of China's regional aviation and maritime coverage. Based on real data and stochastic geometry theory, we model the aviation and maritime communication requirements with H3 grid. Combining beam hopping technology and Walker Delta configuration, we design the system model consisting of the LEO satellite-aviation and maritime (A&M) network. Then, we propose an integer optimization problem to minimize the number of satellites. Considering the nonlinear effect of the satellite number on the constellation coverage capability, we design an integer search algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) to solve the problem. Simulation results indicate the advantage of beam hopping technology for saving system capacity and the influence of bandwidth and beam resources on reducing the number of satellites. Based on the results, we find that the optimal altitude of satellites is determined by the beam capacity, and the optimal inclination should lean the communication resources to latitudes with high traffic.