AN OVERVIEW OF SCHEDULING PROBLEMS ARISING IN SATELLITE-COMMUNICATIONS

Satellite communications, like batches of work in a job shop, need to be scheduled in order to use their resources as efficiently as possibl e. The most common satellite communications system in use today is kno wn as Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), in which data from earth s tations is buffered before being transmitted to the appropriate receiv er on a satellite. Cycles of transmission are fixed for all stations. Since the same satellite will be used for routeing data in several dif ferent ways, a schedule must be devised to use the receivers, repeater s and transmitters on board to minimize the time needed for completion of a batch of work. This paper is a survey of current scheduling algo rithms used for optimizing satellite communications resources. Apart f rom telecommunications, the methods presented here could be applied to more general scheduling problems with renewable resources but without precedence constraints.