Research on Joint Resource Allocation for Multibeam Satellite Based on Metaheuristic Algorithms

With the rapid growth of satellite communication demand and the continuous development of high-throughput satellite systems, the satellite resource allocation problem—also called the dynamic resources management (DRM) problem—has become increasingly complex in recent years. The use of metaheuristic algorithms to obtain acceptable optimal solutions has become a hot topic in research and has the potential to be explored further. In particular, the treatment of invalid solutions is the key to algorithm performance. At present, the unused bandwidth allocation (UBA) method is commonly used to address the bandwidth constraint in the DRM problem. However, this method reduces the algorithm’s flexibility in the solution space, diminishes the quality of the optimized solution, and increases the computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a bandwidth constraint handling approach based on the non-dominated beam coding (NDBC) method, which can eliminate the bandwidth overlap constraint in the algorithm’s population evolution and achieve complete bandwidth flexibility in order to increase the quality of the optimal solution while decreasing the computational complexity. We develop a generic application architecture for metaheuristic algorithms using the NDBC method and successfully apply it to four typical algorithms. The results indicate that NDBC can enhance the quality of the optimized solution by 9–33% while simultaneously reducing computational complexity by 9–21%.