FIELD OF TECHNOLOGY

The invention relates to methods and systems for assisting in placing beams, also called “coverage beams”, to cover a plurality of locations on Earth. The invention may be used to, though not limited to, assist in providing broadband communications, such as internet connectivity to a plurality of terminals.

BACKGROUND

A beam formed with a directional antenna or antenna array arranged on a satellite orbiting the Earth typically covers a region, also called “coverage area”, on Earth, thus enabling terminals located within said region to communicate through the satellite with, for example, a remote ground station.

Statically placing beams to cover a plurality of fixed regions on Earth may turn out to be inefficient because, if terminals are moving and roaming across beams, no terminal or very few terminals may be located at one point in time in a given region covered by a beam. Further, the number of available beams may be insufficient to cover all the regions through which the terminals may move.

An alternative beam placement technique is a “follow the remote” configuration wherein a single beam is dedicated to a single terminal and the beam's center is updated to match the terminal's location. This technique may, however, also lead to an inefficient use of bandwidth as some terminals may merely consume a fraction of the full capacity of a beam.

In view of the above, there is a need for solutions to assist in efficiently placing beams to cover a plurality of locations on Earth, in particular, but not only, locations corresponding to terminals on ships or aircraft, i.e. mobile terminals.

SUMMARY

The present invention aims at addressing, at least partially, the above-mentioned need. The invention includes methods, systems, computer programs, computer program products, and computer-readable storage mediums as defined in the independent claims. Particular embodiments are defined in the dependent claims.

In one embodiment, a method, carried out by a processing device or a set of processing devices, is provided for assisting in placing beams to cover a plurality of locations on Earth. The method comprises: grouping the plurality of locations into cliques by applying a clique problem resolution technique to an undirected graph whose vertices correspond to the plurality of locations and wherein two vertices of the undirected graph are connected by an edge if they correspond to two locations that are regarded as coverable by a single beam; assigning a beam to each of at least some of the cliques; and outputting parameters usable to control at least one beam source to form the assigned beams.

The method assists in efficiently placing beams to cover a plurality of locations on Earth by outputting parameters usable by a beam source or a plurality of beam sources to form beams. In particular, the method results in a beam layout generally minimizing the number of beams needed to cover the plurality of locations. Further, the method generally enables that goal to be reached in a computationally efficient way, and thus in a feasible way, even with a large number of locations—and correspondingly a large number of terminals—, or with a large number of resulting beams, or with both.

The invention also relates to a system for carrying out the above-described method, to a computer program or set of computer programs comprising computer-readable instructions for carrying out the above-described method, and to related computer program products and computer-readable storage mediums.

In one embodiment, a method as described above is provided comprising, instead of, or in addition to, outputting parameters usable to control beam source(s) to form beams, simulating a beam placement in accordance with assigned beams. The method in this embodiment therefore assists in efficiently simulating a beam placement to cover a plurality of locations on Earth for example to validate the addition of new locations corresponding to new terminals, changing the bandwidth associated with some terminals, etc. The simulation relies on a beam layout generation process generally minimizing the number of beams needed to cover the plurality of locations. Further, that goal is generally reached in a computationally efficient way, and thus in a feasible way, even with many locations—and correspondingly many terminals—, or with many beams, or with both.

The invention also relates to a system for carrying out the above-described method comprising a beam placement simulation, to a computer program or set of computer programs comprising computer-readable instructions for carrying out the above-described method comprising a beam placement simulation, and to related computer program products and computer-readable storage mediums.

