Time Slot Assignment in SS/TDMA Systems with Intersatellite Links

In this paper we study the time slot assignment problem in clusters of SS/TDMA satellite systems interconnected through intersatellite links. We show that the problem of finding an assignment which minimizes the total transmission time is NP-complete, i.e., computationally intractable, even for quite restricted intersatellite link patterns and simplified system models. Successively, we focus our attention on clusters of two satellites, proposing a branch-and-bound optimal algorithm and two fast heuristic algorithms. We investigate the performance of the proposed heuristic algorithms both by a theoretical worst case bound and by simulation trials showing that the produced solutions are close to the optimal on the average.