A novel mobility model and resource reservation strategy for multimedia LEO satellite networks

Multimedia LEO satellite networks will play an important role in providing truly global coverage required by mobile personal communication services. Due to the high mobility inherent to LEO systems, a number of challenging technical problems arise. The first contribution of this work is to propose a realistic mobility model, taking into account the rotation of the Earth, which was systematically ignored in the literature. Our second contribution is a novel resource reservation strategy, termed sequential probabilistic resource reservation (SPR), specifically designed to minimize connection interruption due to handoffs. Finally, we propose a novel connection admission control (CAC) algorithm, differentiating real-time and non-real-time services. Performance results obtained by simulation show that the novel mobility model is essential for a realistic network performance evaluation and that the novel SPR strategy offers low handoff blocking probability for both service classes and low new call blocking probability for non-real-time connections.