  Satellite communication by leveraging the use of low earth orbit (LEO)
satellites is expected to play an essential role in future communication
systems through providing ubiquitous and continuous wireless connectivity. This
thus has motivated the work in the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) to
ensure the operation of fifth generation (5G) New Radio (NR) protocols for
non-terrestrial network (NTN). In this paper, we consider a NR-based LEO
satellite communication system, where satellites equipped with phased array
antennas are employed to serve user equipments (UEs) on the ground. To reduce
payload weight and meet the time-varying traffic demands of UEs, an efficient
beam hopping scheme considering both the traffic demands and inter-beam
interference is proposed to jointly schedule beams and satellite transmit
power. Then based on NR protocols, we present the first system-level
evaluations of beam hopping scheme in LEO satellite system under different
operating frequency bands and traffic models. Simulation results indicate that
significant performance gains can be achieved by the proposed beam hopping
scheme, especially under the distance limit constraint that avoids scheduling
adjacent beams simultaneously, as compared to benchmark schemes.
