An Auxiliary Ground Station Based Traffic Load Balancing Scheme for LEO Satellite Systems

In the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite mobile communication system, traffic load in a spot beam fluctuates dramatically with a wide dynamic range due to the non-uniform geographical distribution of the traffic sources and the periodic satellite motion. The compromise between the utilization rate of valuable satellite channels and the blocking probability of a call causes higher proportion of channel idle time and cost of per connection. A new scheme based on auxiliary ground station (AGS) is proposed to solve this problem. The AGS is set to manage short distance calls. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed scheme balances the whole traffic load in LEO, improves the utilization rate of channels, and reduces the blocking probabilities of new calls and the dropping probabilities of handover calls. The cost of per connection is reduced at the same time.