Enhancing Multiple-Access Capacity and Synchronization in Satellite Beam Hopping with NOMA-SIC

Enhancing user access capacity in satellite beam-hopping systems remains challenging due to dynamic traffic and limited beam dwell times. Conventional Multi-Frequency Time-Division Multiple Access (MF-TDMA) proves highly inefficient under such constraints. To overcome this, we propose a novel scheme that integrates power-domain Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) with MF-TDMA, employing Successive Interference Cancelation (SIC) for multi-user signal separation. A bi-directional adaptive carrier synchronization method and optimized burst structure are introduced, which collectively reduce synchronization overhead by over 40% compared to MF-TDMA. Simulations demonstrate a dramatically improved frame error rate of 0.0005% at 4 dB SNR—30 times lower than the 0.016% achieved by MF-TDMA—and a transmission efficiency of 92–97%, significantly outperforming conventional MF-TDMA. These results validate the proposed method’s substantial gains in capacity and efficiency for next-generation satellite systems.