Demand assignment multiple access and dynamic channel allocation strategies for integrating radio dispatch and telephone services over mobile satellite systems

The authors discuss the performance analyses of a novel demand assignment multiple access (DAMA) scheme addressing the special characteristics of the mobile radio service (MRS), and a new method for dynamically allocating a common pool of channels to both MRS and mobile telephone service (MTS) to improve channel utilization. The new DAMA scheme makes use of call queuing, batch processing, and pipelined signaling to minimize call setup overhead for MRS traffic. MRS call setup delays were analyzed by simulation modeling of a mobile satellite system (MSS) with many mobile voice-dispatch networks operating over a multiple spot beam satellite to investigate the effects of traffic volume, batch size, and batch service disciplines. A reserved channel margin algorithm for dynamic channel allocation was shown to be effective in harmonizing the different call setup performance requirements for MTS and MRS. Numerical results show that dynamic channel allocation applied to a common pool of 40 channels enables a 20-25% increase in the number of mobile terminals compared with a fixed allocation of 20 channels to each of the two services