Global Resource Manager for Mobile Satellite Systems Employing Non-uniform Frequency Allocations
Jeffrey Freedman, Philip Rubin, Ted Kaplan, Eric Halvorsen, Adam Eisenman, Farinaz Edalar, Arnold Berman, Scott Markley · 2010
8RKF Engineering, Washington, DC, 20036 The Global Resource Manager (GRM) acts as a central coordination tool for the next generation of beamforming satellite systems providing mobile service. This system planning tool establishes resource plans which coordinate between satellite and terrestrial networks to allow sharing spectrum and to determine operational rules for the satellite base stations. The GRM provides numerous functions for both developing and analyzing new and existing plans, including support for beamforming, performing capacity analyses (based on traffic profiles), and link budgets. The system is capable of generating plans with both uniform and non-uniform frequency-reuse patterns and beam sizes. Requirements may be assigned to beams individually or may be assigned to a group of beams within a specified region. Numerous other constraints can be built directly into the GRM, such as frequency and power sharing with ancillary terrestrial component (ATC) stations as well as specific Federal Communication Commission (FCC) and satellite limits. As such, the GRM provides a complete solution for generating resource plans for Mobile Satellite Service (MSS). This paper goes into the details regarding the GRM’s frequency allocation engine. Frequency allocations in terrestrial and satellite systems have typically been performed over a uniform color/frequency pattern - assigning a set of frequencies to beams of a particular color. The GRM goes beyond this unnecessary restriction and allocates frequencies and power levels non-uniformly, this way optimizing the allocation to meet the need of each particular beam in the laydown. Allocations are performed while assuring a lower bound of inter-beam Carrier-to-Interference ratio for each allocated channel in every beam, as well as adhering to interference limits to legacy fixed service ground stations.