Energy-Efficient Dynamic Beam Management for LEO Satellites

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication networks have been considered as a promising solution to provide high data rate and seamless coverage, where the satellite beam management plays a key role. However, as the size of LEO satellite constellations continues to grow, the limited on-board energy resources have become a key challenge limiting the longterm operation of satellites. In this article, aiming at improving the energy efficiency, a beam management problem has been formulated for dynamic LEO satellite communication networks, under service capacity constraints. Considering the nonlinear relationship between the depth-of-discharge (DoD) and battery cycle life, we introduce DoD metrics to dynamically characterize the cycle life consumption of satellite batteries. To deal with the essentially non-convex optimization problem, we divide it into three subproblems, including satellite-cell mapping, beam pattern design, and power allocation. In the first step, the satellite-cell mapping is performed according to the relationship between the traffic demands and satellite DoD. Then, the time and power allocation algorithms are implemented to ensure the service capacity while reducing the energy consumption. Compared with baselines, numerical results show that our proposal exhibits 8.2 times and 11.4 times improvements in energy efficiency, while reducing cycle life consumption by 88.9% and 93.3%, respectively.