Advance handovers arrangement and channel allocation in LEO satellite systems

Due to the high mobility nature of the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems, the satellite's coverage area changes with time causing an extremely frequent handover rate. Therefore handover procedure has a significant impact on the success of LEO systems and handover failure rate is a major criterion in measuring the system's performance. In this paper we propose a handover procedure called advance handovers arrangement and channel allocation (AHACA) to maximally exploit the deterministic and predictable characteristics of LEO systems to reduce handover failures and optimize channel utilization. This method does not exclusively guard channels for handovers, instead it queues and reserves channels that are currently in use but will be released within expected queuing time.