Weighted fair bandwidth-on-demand (WFBoD) for geostationary satellite networks with on-board processing

More and more network operators plan to use broadband satellite systems as part of their global broadband multimedia infrastructure because of their large geographic coverage, inherent broadcast capabilities, and fast deployment features. The recent advances on Ka-band transmission, fast on-board switching, and spot beam technologies mean that satellites can be employed efficiently to help provide high-speed, global connectivity to users all around the world. Satellites are multiple access systems with very limited transmission capacity compared to terrestrial network nodes. Therefore, end-to-end resource management for such systems is key to deliver acceptable quality of service to services while providing adequate efficiency (i.e., a level of grade of service that entails the use of such systems).In this paper we present a demand assignment multiple access based resource management protocol, weighted fair bandwidth-on-demand (WFBoD), for geostationary satellite networks with on-board processing. WFBoD combines flexibility with efficiency and the "right" level of traffic segregation. We formulate the global resource allocation problem central to which is a large "generic" integer value optimization problem with a large number of coupled constraints. We propose heuristics to solve this optimization problem and compare their performances and their complexity with the formal solution.