Study and Implementation of Switching and Beam-Hopping Tchniques in Satellites with On Board Processing

Abstract

In this paper we address different downlink dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) techniques in a GEO stationary (GEO) satellite communication network. The goal is designing a low complexity system which can adapt to the terminal traffic requests. We investigate a possible way to increase the performance of the system by means of an interaction between on-board switching fabric (SF) and beam hopping (BH). We consider a system where an adaptive process provides uplink DBA, whereas a BH module works as downlink bandwidth allocator. Specifically, the BH module determines the number of carriers to be allocated to each downlink spot-beam on the basis of the traffic queues at the input of the SF. Simulation results show that the interaction between SF and BH is a good candidate to increase the performance of the system, since it allows reducing queue sizes in the satellite.