Performance evaluation of prioritized handover management for LEO mobile satellite systems with dynamic channel assignment

This paper presents a handover prioritization scheme based on the usage of guard transceivers in capacity limited low-Earth-orbit (LEO) mobile satellite systems with dynamic channel assignment (DCA). Simulation tests were carried out in order to evaluate the performance of this scheme. The results show that, in the LEO satellite systems with non-uniform traffic the system performance parameters such as call blocking, handover failure and grade of service (GoS) are significantly better by DCA than by the fixed channel assignment (FCA) strategy. Another achievement is the improvement of the handover blocking probability and GoS by systems using guard transceivers for prioritized handover attempts. The most efficient percentage of the channels reserved for handover has been determined.