For many years, satellite footprints have been fixed from the design phase until the last day of the satellite operational life. Flexibility in coverage by means of reconfigurable beams is becoming increasingly popular thanks to the recent developments in active antenna systems. On the other hand, spatial frequency reuse combined with precoding has been shown to boost the spectral efficiency while lowering the cost per bit. In this context, and motivated by the unbalanced demand requests of the satellite
users, we propose a shift from the traditional system-throughput
maximization design towards a demand-Aware design, where a
new beam shaping technique and user scheduling are combined
to satisfy the users’ demands. Supporting numerical results
are provided that validate the effectiveness of the proposed
beam planning and scheduling and quantify the benefits over
conventional rigid techniques
