Clustering Strategies for Multicast Precoding in Multi-Beam Satellite Systems

Next generation multi-beam SatCom architectures will heavily exploit full frequency reuse schemes along with interference management techniques, e.g., precoding or multiuser detection, to drastically increase the system throughput. In this framework, we address the problem of the user selection for multicast precoding by formulating it as a clustering problem. By introducing a novel mathematical framework, we design fixed-/variable-size clustering algorithms that group users into simultaneously precoded and served clusters while maximising the system throughput. Numerical simulations are used to validate the proposed algorithms and to identify the main system-level trade-offs.