Computer-aided planning of SS/TDMA network operation

A computer-aided approach to the planning of SS/TDMA network operation is proposed. SS/TDMA is a sophisticated satellite communication network based on an onboard switch matrix, whose operation planning is formulated as a large-scale scheduling problem. An overall planning and scheduling model is presented to deal with practical SS/TDMA systems, such as a two-frequency channel network and nondisjoint beam coverage. For systematic planning suitable for a computer-aided approach, the entire scheduling process is divided into several steps, for each of which an efficient mathematical model is proposed. A linear programming model is used for distribution of traffic on a beam-to-beam basis and the generated switching sequence is further refined by a model using the traveling salesman problem. Burst scheduling is carried out by the Bin packing algorithm and scheduling models for practical networks allowing transponder hopping and multidestination bursts. An algorithm called enhanced rescheduling is presented to further improve the scheduling capability of the existing methods. The performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated by simulation results.>