Power Allocation and Beam Illumination Design for Time-Flexible Satellite Systems

Satellite beam hopping provides time-domain flexibility with proven benefits in improving supplied capacity-demand matching while reducing the power and mass of the satellite payload. However, due to the combinatorial properties of beam scheduling and coupling in the time domain, resource optimization of beam hopping can be challenging. This paper presents an efficient optimization framework for addressing complex beam-hopping problems from the perspective of frame-level planning. In the framework, we first introduce continuous variables to represent each beam's timeslot usage of a frame (or each beam's illumination probability at an arbitrary timeslot), thereby converting the mixed-integer problem into a continuous one with a smaller problem scale. Based on optimized power allocation and timeslot usage (or illumination probability), we then map continuous solutions to binary ones and determine the beam-timeslot scheduling on a demand-aware basis. Numerical results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework, with benefits including power saving, complexity reduction, and improved capacity-demand matching.