Performance analysis of on-board switching in broadband satellite communication systems

We consider a method for studying the statistical multiplexing gain of an on-board switching broadband satellite communication system supporting multimedia services, which satisfies the QoS requirements at call level and burst level. The different types of calls such as voice, video, etc., originating from a particular uplink beam and destined to a particular downlink beam, arrive according to a Poisson process, and stay in the system for an exponentially distributed holding time. Each call admitted into the system, is assumed to require the uplink and downlink capacity units at the burst level, according to either single on-off source or composites of many mini-on-off sources. The burst blocking probabilities can be calculated, based on quasi-static approximation and recursion. Using this analysis, we examine the achievable statistical multiplexing gain of the on-board switch for given required QoS of the traffic types.