An elastic handover scheme for LEO satellite mobile communication systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a new handover management scheme for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite mobile communication systems-elastic channel locking (ECL) scheme. Based on the feature that the mobile terminal's entry into and departure from a cell is predictable in LEO systems, this scheme provides a flexible way to control quality of service in terms of blocking probability and handover failure probability by adjusting the time to send out channel reservation request during the handover process. A mathematical model is established to analyze this scheme. To gain a comprehensive insight into this scheme, call incompletion probability is employed to evaluate the traffic capacity of a communication system. It is shown that ECL can maximize the channel utilization and enable the system to accommodate the most number of customers.