  Beam-Hopping (BH) and precoding are two trending technologies for the
satellite community. While BH enables flexibility to adapt the offered capacity
to the heterogeneous demand, precoding aims at boosting the spectral
efficiency. In this paper, we consider a high throughput satellite (HTS) system
that employs BH in conjunction with precoding. In particular, we propose the
concept of Cluster-Hopping (CH) that seamlessly combines the BH and precoding
paradigms and utilize their individual competencies. The cluster is defined as
a set of adjacent beams that are simultaneously illuminated. In addition, we
propose an efficient time-space illumination pattern design, where we determine
the set of clusters that can be illuminated simultaneously at each hopping
event along with the illumination duration. We model the CH time-space
illumination pattern design as an integer programming problem which can be
efficiently solved. Supporting results based on numerical simulations are
provided which validate the effectiveness of the proposed CH concept and
time-space illumination pattern design.
