Adaptive resource sharing strategies for TDMA satellite networks

The Ka band (20/30 GHz) is very attractive for future digital satellite communication systems with small earth stations. However, rain fading causes severe attenuations for a small percentage of the average year. To guarantee near continuous availability, adaptive fade countermeasures have to be applied. To provide a constant information rate, most of these countermeasures require additional bandwidth, so that some reserve in bandwidth has to be included into the link budget. This paper analyses several strategies, how to share a common resource of bandwidth among a number of stations in a TDMA system. It is shown, that the same quality approach, the aim of which is to level the link qualities of all stations to the same E_b/N₀ value, can improve the average bit error rate of the net by up to two powers of ten with only 30 percent of reserve in time and 10 percent in frequency