Optimal management in broadband satellite communication networks

Abstract

Broadband satellite communications networks have numerous advantages. However, these advantages come along with a challenge. Several problems should be resolved effectively. In networking aspect, these problems include mobility management, radio resource management, call control, intersatellite link (ISL) routing, integration of terrestrial and satellite mobile networks, and network dimensioning. In the thesis, the intersatellite link routing problem, radio resource management, and handover are focused on. The trend toward broadband communications in space is foreseeable, and its features predestine ATM as the basic mode of operation. Some of the low and medium earth orbit satellite concepts make use of intersatellite links to provide global connectivity. The ISL’s have a time varying distance or may even loose sight of each other. This feature composes of the ISL topology dynamics, which significantly increases the complexity of connection-oriented network operation and routing. We deal with the routing problem to minimize the virtual path connection (VPC) handover rate and path delay in the time varying ISL subnetwork topology. An algorithm is proposed to obtain an optimal solution of this problem, which is based on dynamic programming. For evaluation of our algorithm, some computational results have been presented. These results show that our optimization algorithm can produce a much better solution than the previous algorithm. As a low earth orbit (LEO) satellite moves along its orbit, its relative position to the earth changes continuously and so does the traffic requirement for each satellite pair. This leads to the fluctuation of the offered traffic for each intersatellite link. Therefore, a careful routing algorithm is necessary in order that the offered traffic always does not exceed the capacity of the intersatellite link. To tackle this, we define a routing problem considering both of the VPC handover and the ISL capacity constraints, and propose a h...