Research on Resource Allocation Algorithm for Satellite Uplink to Provide Differentiated QoS Support

Abstract

Broadband satellite systems are built to serve different user groups ranging from enterprise and military users to common personal users, with various kinds of services calling for dissimilar quality of service (QoS). Obviously, the satellite systems are expected to distinguish the specific type of an incoming service request as well as the importance of its owner in order to perform an efficient assignment of valuable resources. In this article, the uplink resource management challenge in a multifrequency-time-division multiple access satellite system is addressed where provisioning the discriminated QoS is of vital importance. Having taken both user priority and service type into account, a differentiated QoS support principle conforming to the digital video broadcast - second generation DVB interactive satellite system (DVB-RCS2) standard is put forward, based on which the uplink timeslot assignment problem is formulated.The NP-hardness of the problem is proved, and a differentiated QoS resource allocation scheme is designed, decoupling the problem into the coarse-level of resource allocation and fine-level of timeslot assignment. The former stage involves the constant rate assignment, bandwidth adjustment, QoS degradation and user scheduling, among which the subproblem of user scheduling is an integer nonlinear program. To tackle the issue, the problem is first innovatively converted to an integer linear program, and is then modeled as the multiple-choice multiple knapsack (MCMK) problem. Furthermore, an MCMK algorithm is presented to give the optimal solution to the user scheduling problem, after which the timeslot assignment is investigated in the second phase to generate the terminal burst time plan table for return channel satellite terminals.