Perceptive Packet Scheduling for Carrier Aggregation in Satellite Communication Systems

Abstract

Carrier Aggregation is one of the essential approaches to achieve several orders of magnitude increase in peak data rates. While carrier aggregation benefits have been extensively studied in terrestrial wireless systems, its application to satellite has not been substantially explored. Carrier aggregation can be a prominent solution to address the issue of the spatially-heterogeneous satellite data traffic demand. This paper studies introducing carrier aggregation into satellite systems from a link layer perspective. The proposed modifications at the link layer have been carefully designed to make carrier aggregation transparent to the other layers. However, deployment of carrier aggregation in satellite systems with the combination of multiple carriers that have different characteristics requires effective scheduling schemes for reliable communications. Since channel awareness is indispensable for any efficient resource allocation schemes, we have proposed a perceptive scheduling algorithm that takes into account channel properties along with the instantaneous available resources to ensure that the received data packets are delivered without perturbing the original transmission order. Simulation results are given to validate our analysis and demonstrate the design tradeoffs, and thus, our results provide useful insights to practical scheduler design.