Multigateway precoded NOMA in multibeam satellite multicast systems

In this paper, we consider multigateway-based multibeam satellite non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) multicast systems. We investigate the improvement in spectral efficiency and accessibility by superimposing multiple signals on each beam at the same frequency and time resource employing NOMA, where multiple gateways transmit precoded signals to alleviate inter-beam interference caused by full frequency reuse. We formulate an optimization problem of maximizing the sum rate while satisfying the gateways and satellite transmission power constraints, where the precoding vector and power allocation for superposition coding as well as the decoding order for successive interference cancellation are optimized. This optimization problem is challenging to solve due to its non-convex mixed-integer nonlinear programming. However, a suboptimal solution can be obtained using a block coordinate descent algorithm. The simulation results of the proposed NOMA technique are compared with those of the orthogonal multiple access (OMA) technique. The proposed technique outperforms the OMA technique. We also investigate the impact of channel imperfection and decoding capability of the proposed algorithm through some selected simulation results.