Joint Design of Beam Hopping and Precoding for RSMA-Enabled LEO Satellite Internet of Things

Low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a promising solution to address the limitations of terrestrial IoT by providing global coverage and seamless connectivity. Among the various techniques enhancing LEO satellite IoT, beam hopping (BH) stands out as an efficient approach that dynamically adjusts beam illumination to match the varying traffic demands of diverse IoT devices. This flexibility enables optimal utilization of limited on-board resources. However, while BH allows adaptive beam illumination planning, it can also introduce severe inter-beam interference, particularly when adjacent beams are simultaneously activated. To address this challenge, we propose a novel rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA)-enabled cluster-based beam hopping (CBH) LEO satellite IoT system. By leveraging RSMA, the proposed framework supports large-scale IoT devices access, and mitigates inter-beam interference introduced by CBH. Within this framework, we introduce a metric—the ratio of offered capacity to traffic demand (ROCD)—to quantify how well the required traffic sum rate aligns with the achievable sum rate for each beam. We then focus on jointly optimizing the precoding vector, common rate allocation, and CBH pattern design to maximize the worst-case ROCD among beams. To solve this problem efficiently, we decompose the original problem into three sub-problems and propose a two-stage algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed scheme improves the minimum satisfaction rate by 14.10% and 39.59% compared to the non-orthogonal multiple access and space-division multiple access baselines, achieving effective interference mitigation.