Low-complexity user scheduling for LEO satellite communications

With the increasing number of user terminals (UTs), the interference among UTs might significantly decrease the throughput of the low earth orbit satellite communication system. In this paper, the user scheduling method is investigated to suppress user interference. Specifically, leveraging the strong spatial directivity of satellite channels, a low-complexity angle-based orthogonal user selection (AOUS) algorithm is proposed, which selects UTs with nearly orthogonal channels via angle information of UTs. A rate-based proportionally fair (PF)-AOUS algorithm is further proposed to ensure fairness among UTs, which combines the AOUS with the PF criterion. To reduce complexity, an improved angle-based PF-AOUS algorithm that schedules UTs according to their pitch angles rather than their rates is proposed. In addition, efficient precoding schemes for orthogonal UTs are designed by combining the steering vector and power allocation matrix, and it is shown that precoding can be converted into power allocation problems that further balance fairness and throughput. The numerical results indicate that the AOUS achieves a near-optimal sum rate performance, and the angle-based PF-AOUS has the similar performance to the rate-based PF-AOUS, which achieves a high fairness index with the proposed precoding scheme.