Nongeostationary mega-constellations have the potential to offer low-latency services to under-served geographical areas and aeronautical/maritime sectors. This will be enabled through a constellation involving low Earth orbit (LEO) fleet of satellites, which can be massively produced and inexpensively launched. Most of the existing trunking satellite systems are optimized (in terms of resources, processing, and architectures) for the GEO consolidated architecture. This system design vastly differs from the envisaged LEO system due to the motion ofthe satellite and limited coverage. This chapter considers the development of a tool to optimize the resources, processing, and architectures for next-generation LEO systems to meet the increasing requirements from trunking markets. The developed optimization tool jointly optimizes the number of beams, beam width, power, and bandwidth allocation in order to match the provided data rate to the predicted traffic demand. Due to the generic nature of the proposed method, further system parameters, such as orbit parameters, number of satellites, or frequency reuse factor, can be easily added to the list of optimization parameters. The proposed solution is numerically evaluated for a trunking market of static end users. The proposed solution shows a very good traffic matching and outperforms a naive approach without optimization.

Chapter Contents:

• 58.1 Introduction
• 58.2 System modeling and requirements
• 58.2.1 Link budget
• 58.2.2 Traffic demand
• 58.3 System optimization
• 58.3.1 Optimization parameters
• 58.3.2 Methodology
• 58.4 Numerical results
• 58.5 Limitations and future enhancements
• 58.6 Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• References

Inspec keywords: artificial satellites; optimisation; telecommunication network routing; cellular radio; satellite links; bandwidth allocation; telecommunication traffic

Other keywords: developed optimization tool; next-generation LEO systems; predicted traffic demand; optimization parameters; orbit parameters; GEO consolidated architecture; trunking market; beam width; system parameters; system design; mega-constellation design; nongeostationary mega-constellations; trunking satellite systems; limited coverage; geographical areas; envisaged LEO system

Subjects: Communication network design, planning and routing; Satellite communication systems; Optimisation techniques; Mobile radio systems