Capacity as a consideration for providing aeronautical mobile satellite air traffic services in the US domestic airspace

International standards are being developed by the International Civil Aviation Organization for an aeronautical mobile-satellite service (AMSS). Moreover, the American Mobile Satellite Corporation (AMSC) is constructing a satellite communications that could provide this service in US domestic airspace. The author describes a preliminary analysis of the capacity (number of aircraft) that could be handled by the first-generation AMSC system in the early part of the 21st century. The analysis is based on assumptions for the service demand, the Aeronautical Telecommunications Network (ATN), the communications scheme, the satellite channel, and the aircraft earth station (AES). Capacity is examined in terms of spectral bandwidth required and satellite power limitations. Service demand is for data link messages for the air traffic services functions of the AMSS. Sensitivity of the results is examined with regard to variations in service demand, spectral efficiencies of different modulation techniques, aircraft antenna equipage, high-gain or low-gain, and the amount of overhead associated with the ATN