Joint Scheduling and Precoding for Frame-Based Multigroup Multicasting in Satellite Communications

Recent satellite standards enforce the coding of multiple users’ data in a frame. This transmission strategy mimics the well-known physical layer multigroup multicasting (MGMC). However, typical beam coverage with a large number of users and limited frame length lead to the scheduling of only a few users. Moreover, in emerging aggressive frequency reuse systems, scheduling is coupled with precoding. This is addressed in this work, through the joint design of scheduling and precoding for frame-based MGMC satellite systems. This aim is formulated as the maximization of the sum-rate under per beam power constraint and minimum SINR requirement of scheduled users. Further, a framework is proposed to transform the non-smooth SR objective with integer scheduling and nonconvex SINR constraints as a difference-of-convex problem that facilitates the joint update of scheduling and precoding. Therein, an efficient convex-concave procedure based algorithm is proposed. Finally, the gains (up to 50%) obtained by the jointed design over state-of-the-art methods is shown through Monte-Carlo simulations