Space-Borne Multibeam Array Pattern Synthesis for Increasing Capacity

The traditional pattern synthesis method of space-borne array is to achieve a “iso-flux” beam coverage via approximating a desired pattern; however, the synthesized pattern may not optimize the whole satellite communication (SatCom) system performance. This paper analyzes the interference in multibeam SatCom system using CDMA, and establishes the relation model between user capacity and multibeam pattern. Additionally, a novel particle swarm optimization (PSO) based on simulated annealing (SA) pattern synthesis method is proposed, which chooses user capacity as synthesis objective function. The numerical analysis, which is performed for a hexagonal array with 19 stacked patch elements, confirms that user capacity is at least doubled with the “max-gain-flux” beam coverage implemented by our method, compared to the “iso-flux” coverage when communication outage probability is 10%.