Communications capacity analysis for multiple-beam processing satellites

This paper analytically compares the communications capacity of various satellite payload architectures against a fixed quality of service (QoS) metric which is connection blocking probability. The effectiveness of the payload architectures is dependent on the payload switching technique, multiple access scheme, and the number of satellite antenna beams utilized. The payloads considered are an on-board circuit switch and an on-board asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch. It is shown that a demand assigned multiple access scheme (DAMA) with an on-board ATM switch provides the best performance in terms of communications payload resource utilization. It is also shown that DAMA with a circuit-switched payload provides efficient performance if the number of satellite beams employed is small. Finally, it is shown that the degree of DAMA resource sharing allowed in the system strongly influences resource utilization performance. The sensitivity of these results to key system parameters is determined and further work in this area is proposed.