Design and analysis of satellite clusters

The authors present a performance study of a satellite cluster consisting of m satellites interconnected through intersatellite links (ISLs). In each satellite, the uplinks are operated under the slotted ALOHA policy, while the downlinks and intersatellite links are operated employing the TDM (time division multiplexing) policy. The packets successfully arriving at the satellite from the earth zones and from the ISLs are stored onboard the satellite. The satellite cluster performance is expressed in terms of throughput. The performance measure is obtained as a function of the system load and traffic distribution, and of the system configuration in terms of the number of uplinks, number of downlinks, number of buffers, number of transponders, and the ISL capacity. As an exact Markov modeling of the above system leads to intractable solutions, a tractable approximate analysis is introduced. The introduced analysis can be used to investigate the sensitivity of the system performance as a function of the system configuration