Robust Multigroup Multicast Transmission for Frame-Based Multi-Beam Satellite Systems

We investigate robust multigroup multicast transmission for frame-based multi-beam satellite communication systems with full frequency reuse. To mitigate the effect of outdated channel state information (CSI), we first investigate robust multigroup multicast precoding that maximizes the minimum average signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) under the per-beam power constraints. We show the relationship between the robust max-min fair problem and the robust power minimization problem with partial CSI and propose a low complexity precoder for the robust power minimization problem. We then investigate user clustering which only requires partial CSI. We show that the approximated average SINR can be maximized provided that the estimated channel vectors of the users in the same cluster are linearly dependent while those in different clusters are mutually orthogonal. Motivated by this user clustering condition, we further propose a low-complexity user clustering algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed robust approach can provide substantial performance gains over the conventional approach in multi-beam satellite communication systems.