Performance characterization of dynamic allocation schemes for multi-frequency TDMA SATCOM-on-the-move

Future military networks will make significant use of transponding satellites to carry converged Internet protocol (IP) traffic to on-the-move communication nodes, which suffer frequent, short signal blockage events. Multi-frequency time-division multiple access (MF-TDMA) with dynamic resource allocation is a leading approach to efficiently use satellite resources under these conditions. The dynamic resource allocation protocol interacts with the dynamics of the blockage channel, the network traffic, and other protocols. We compare a range of protocols from fixed allocation to genie-aided approaches where optimistic assumptions about the information available to the algorithm provide an intuitive upper bound on performance. Specific quantitative metrics for user traffic quality are defined and compared for various algorithms and traffic loads