Performance study of low Earth-orbit satellite systems

Considerable interest has been focusing on the possibility of employing a large number of low Earth orbit (LEG) satellites to provide an overall global coverage. However, there has been no performance study of such systems. The authors investigate the performance of low Earth orbit-satellite systems in terms of the system capacity, the average number of beam-to-beam handoffs and satellite-to-satellite handoffs the channel occupancy distribution and the average call drop probability. These performance measures are obtained as a function of: (1) the network constellation, (2) the satellite speed, (3) the cell size, and (4) the average transaction duration. These metrics are exemplified on the Iridium system. The results derived provide useful and simple tools for system design as well as for system analysis