Adrian Woodrough

and 1 more

To meet the increased bandwidth demand from remote locations, new satellites are being launched to allow networks to operate at higher frequencies (i.e., Ka-band – 27.0GHz - 40.0 GHz and V-band 40.0GHz – 75GHz). At these frequencies high availability is challenged by rain attenuation. Consequently, satellite network operators are offering hybrid solutions where, during a rain outage, traffic is moved to a lower frequency secondary heterogeneous satellite network not affected by rain.   This paper evaluates a mobile and network centric handover and admission strategy using a bespoke simulation model of a rain affected star topology hybrid satellite network with primary network operating on Ka band and secondary satellite network operating at a lower frequency.    Results show that a network centric prioritised queue-based admission strategy provides a reduction in handover failure probability of about 5% without extra capacity being made available for the handover of traffic to the secondary network. When queue-based admission is used in combination with adding extra capacity in the secondary satellite network a reduction in handover failure probability of nearly 30% was achieved.   However, when more capacity is made available in the secondary network, the advantages of the network centric queue-based admission strategy slowly disappear with added capacity. This means that operators have a clear choice based on whether they believe that their secondary network has sufficient spare capacity, or whether in fact this is unlikely and therefore the extra cost of a queue-based admission strategies should be weighed against loss of revenue due to lost connections.