Outage Constrained Robust Multigroup Multicast Beamforming for Multi-Beam Satellite Communication Systems

We investigate outage constrained robust multigroup multicast beamforming for multi-beam satellite communication systems with full frequency reuse. Based on a satellite downlink beam domain channel model with channel phase uncertainty taken into account, we first investigate robust multigroup multicast beamforming with the aim to maximize the worst-case outage signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio under the outage and the per-beam power constraints. We then cast the outage constrained robust beamforming design into the convex optimization framework with some approximation techniques. Simulation results show that the proposed robust multigroup multicast beamformer can provide significant performance gains in terms of multicast rate and outage probability over the conventional approach.