Performance study of a lightweight DVB-RCS handover scheme for vehicular GEO networks

In the last few years, EU and ESA have funded several research programmes to investigate mobility issues related to the extension of the ETSI DVB-RCS standard in order to provide mobile collective vehicles with broadband access. In this paper, we analyse the performance of a lightweight DVB-RCS handover scheme which relies on a history of recent GPS measurements to estimate the terminal residual residence time within the current spot-beam. A geostationary vehicular satellite network is envisaged which is populated by two classes of terminals sharing the same resources: aircrafts and high speed trains. Mobility updates are periodically conveyed via SYNC bursts to the NCC which implements a threshold-based queuing strategy to prioritise handover requests and minimise the number of connections forced to termination. A first-order approximate analytical model of the network is proposed which is used to derive new connection and handover blocking probabilities. Results are validated through an accurate NS-2 modelling of existing DVB-RCS signalling mechanisms. It is emphasised that our handover scheme does not introduce any change to the signalling messages that are already laid out in the DVB-RCS specification.