An efficient demand-assignment multiple-access scheme for satellite mobile radio dispatch networks

Conventional DAMA (demand-assignment multiple access) designs process mobile radio calls in much the same way as mobile telephone calls. In mobile radio dispatch networks, where the dispatcher is often the resource bottleneck, these designs result in the inefficient use of satellite channels. A novel DAMA design is presented that ameliorates this problem by using the block-calls-queued service discipline, batched processing of several calls by the network dispatcher, and pipelined messaging for channel setup verification. Analysis shows that the proposed design offers advantages in satellite channel utilization and DAMA signaling overhead compared to previous designs. As space segment resources are expected to be very expensive in the mobile satellite systems networks under development, the proposed procedures could result in significant cost savings