SBS TDMA-DA system with VAC and DAC

This paper describes many of the design considerations involved in developlng the demand assignment (DA) subsystem of the TDMA satellite communication system for Satellite Business Systems. Each earth station has a satellite communications controller (SCC) which requests capacity to meet current voice and data traffic demands. A central reference station frequently reallocates capacity based on the requests of all the earth stations in a network. To minimize the amount of satellite capacity required, the SCC has a circuit-switching capability for voice calls as well as for digital data calls. Furthermore, the SCC employs voice activity, compression (VAC) and data activity cornpression (DAC), In which the amount of capacity requested is based on measured average speech activity as well as the number of off-hook voice ports and the number of off-hook data ports. Data calls are queued on a first-come, first-served basis when capacity is not immediateiy available. The reference station distributes excess capacity according to a nonlinear table lookup procedure so that the voice call blocking probability is equalized across the network. The DA system makes much more efficient use of satellite transmission capacity than a design with fixed-capacity trunk routes.