Energy-Efficiency-Based Joint Uplink Resources Allocation for LEO Satellite Beam-Hopping System

Multidimensional resources management enhances the efficiency of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems by dynamically allocating wireless resources. However, the majority of existing studies have overlooked the evolutionary trend of terrestrial terminals (TTs) from homogeneous to heterogeneous types. For instance, energy efficiency (EE) requirements for TTs inherently vary due to differences in their operating environments and deployment costs. Thus, this article investigates the design of beam hopping (BH) patterns, frequency allocation, and power control for LEO satellite uplinks, considering the diverse EE sensitivity (EES) among TTs. Specifically, a resource management problem is formulated to maximize the weighted sum EE, which captures the differences in EES among TTs. Next, an undirected graph is constructed based on EES and spatial isolation, and matching algorithms are proposed according to the many-to-one matching theory to obtain BH patterns. After that, to solve the joint frequency allocation and power control problem, a penalty function is applied to handle the binary variable utilized for expressing frequency allocation. Finally, quadratic transform and minorize–maximization are employed to concave the original problem, which guarantees to obtain a suboptimal solution. Simulation results demonstrate that proposed BH design methods provide a higher optimization ceiling for joint resources management than relevant benchmarks. Besides, the proposed uplink resources management significantly improves the EE by 34% in LEO satellite uplink compared with ignoring EES scheme. This work establishes a novel paradigm for energy-efficient uplink resource management in heterogeneous LEO systems.