Beam pattern optimization based on up/downlink information for multibeam satellite communication systems

To reduce the cost of satellite communications, it is important to minimize the number of beams by arranging the beams so as to suit the traffic load. Although a nonuniform beam pattern optimization method controlled by digital beam forming (DBF) has been proposed, its metric reflects only a single link's information. This conventional method using a single link's information cannot optimize the other links, thus it has limited ability to reduce the number of beams. Therefore, we propose a beam pattern optimization method which matches the traffic load in both the up and downlinks to reduce the required number of beams. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulation.