An Active Multi-Beam Antenna Design Method and Its Application for the Future 6G Satellite Network

Abstract

The active multi-beam antenna can be widely used in the 6G integrated satellite network project, the national satellite Internet project, and other major satellite projects. It determines the key performance indicators of the satellite such as the service coverage area and the communication capacity of all the beams in the forward link and the return link. The active multi-beam antenna is the core technology of satellite payload and has been developed rapidly in recent years. Based on the antenna performance requirements such as the number of giant-scale beams, super-large coverage area, high gain, and high carrier-to-interference ratio (C/I), this paper proposes a new active multi-beam antenna design method, which integrates the multi-objective coordination and multi-feed amplitude and phase weighted optimization algorithms. A balanced optimal solution that meets the performance requirements can be obtained by constraining each other with different objective functions. In the optimization process, the surrogate model of convolutional autoencoder based on artificial intelligence technology is proposed for multi-objective optimization solution, which efficiently completes the search of optimal beam excitation coefficients. This paper takes the demand for very-high-throughput communication satellites serving the Asia-Pacific region as an example and applies the design method to the multi-beam antenna design of the satellite. The simulation verification of the antenna is completed, achieving good performance of 976 beams. All results meet the performance requirements, supporting the implementation of 1 Tbps communication capacity for the entire satellite, and verifying the correctness of the design method.