Leverage re-planning to improve l eo satellite beam-hopping service delivery
Re-Planning Budgets under Admission Control in Grant-Free LEO Beam-Hopping Access
Information Theory
Summary
Satellite networks with many beams deliver data updates by visiting regions in a repeating order. This paper explores how changing this order, within limits, can slightly reduce data delivery delays without losing reliability. The authors provide mathematical guarantees on how much the order can change while keeping service quality high. They also show that when revisits are optimized, maintaining a regular schedule is best. Simulations confirm their findings under realistic signal conditions.
What this means in practice
- •For satellite network operators: Adjust satellite beam visit orders flexibly while guaranteeing minimal delivery rate loss to improve update timeliness in LEO constellations.
- •For wireless network schedulers: Design admission control policies that optimize revisit intervals to maintain efficient resource use in grant-free multi-beam networks.
- •For mobile virtual network operators: Apply ordering constraints in satellite beam scheduling to support prioritized communications with predictable quality in congested scenarios.$Commercial implications: Enables predictable quality of service offerings by managing satellite beam revisit patterns customized for customer priorities.
Tested on simulated data.
Authors
Joon-Young Park, Young-Chai Ko
Abstract
Reordering low-Earth-orbit (LEO) beam-hopping visits can reduce grant-free update delivery even when each region receives the same service time. We derive the largest limit on inter-frame position changes that meets a prescribed delivery-rate loss tolerance when every group is visited once per frame. The guarantee concerns a protected beam's spatially averaged long-run delivery rate relative to optimized periodic service under exogenous re-planning. Fixed admission can favor irregular visits, whereas admission optimized for each revisit interval makes the per-visit reward concave under sufficient conditions on transmission success. Periodic service is then optimal at a fixed mean interval. The shortest and longest allowed intervals determine the exact worst-case loss, attained by feasible alternating visit orders that respect every group's displacement limit. The resulting budget requires no estimate of the revisit-interval distribution and extends to independent stationary renewal updates. In a collision example with 40 groups and 40 resources per slot, increasing the loss tolerance from zero to 1% raises the limit from 17 to 24 positions. With independent priorities, the latter retains over 90% of the priority-weighted waiting-cost reduction achieved by unrestricted ordering. Received-power simulations under Rayleigh fading support the predicted loss.