A proposed mechanism for traffic management during gateway outage periods in high throughput satellite systems

To reach a capacity of 1Tbps the next generation of high throughput satellite systems will have to use frequencies in the Ka band and above. At these frequencies, the precipitation attenuation becomes more severe and may lead to gateway outage events. Considering the weather uncorrelation between the gateway sites, a solution to the outage problem is to redirect the traffic from the gateway in outage to one or more gateways that are able to support it. This paper proposes a mechanism that is able to manage the traffic from the gateway in outage and select the best path in the terrestrial network to redirect the traffic towards an available gateway. The mechanism is tested through simulations in QualNet Developer and the results provide useful insights regarding its potential to redirect the traffic in an HTS system.