A beam-free approach to channel allocation in a multi-beam
four-color satellite coverage area is taken. Non-Orthogonal
Multiple Access (NOMA) and Orthogonal Multiple Access
(OMA) are compared as methods to serve users nonnecessarily
located on the reference beam. A proportional
fairness policy is employed for the user scheduling. The
naturally occurring SNR imbalances in the user terminal population
are exploited in such a way that NOMA outperforms
OMA, partly due to the blurring of the boundaries of the
satellite beams, in such a way that a non-conventional approach
to user pairing can reap more benefits from a system
perspective.