Satellite Beam Handover Strategy to Improve Return Link Resource Utilization

Mobile communication on the multi-beam satellite communication has attracted attention, since Digital Video Broadcasting – Return Channel Satellite (DVB-RCS) has been successively implemented. In general, multi beam satellite employs uniform allocation of RF power and bandwidth to multi beams, since it is hard to predict the distribution of traffic requests and the arrival rate of new connection. This makes it difficult to satisfy the traffic requests in a beam. Thus, when an unpredictable event, such as a disaster, regional warfare and deteriorating weather conditions, occur in a special spot beam, many more terminals will require access to a special beam channel. This causes the special beam channel to be saturated, while adjacent beam channel resources are available. Thus, we propose a novel handover strategy to improve satellite return link resource utilization using load balancing handover. Simulation results shows the proposed handover algorithm outperforms conventional handover algorithms in terms of new connection block probability, handover block probability, return link resource utilization and capacity request block rate.