THE IMPACT OF BEAM FORMING ON THE PERFORMANCE OF AN ON-BOARD OUTPUT BUFFER

Communication satellites frequently employ downlink spot beams to gain efficiency and flexibility. This process may change the output buffer ing behavior of a packet switch because of the extra overhead involved in beam-forming (the dwell setup time). This paper investigates the e ffect of dwell setup time on the output buffer design. Four theoretica l models, including single buffer systems, multiple buffer systems wit h fixed beam forming pattern, multiple buffer systems with adaptive be am forming pattern and multiple buffer systems with fixed time allocat ion, are considered. Analytical queuing solutions are obtained for all the cases except for the exhaustive and gated adaptive multiple buffe r systems, in which only the state transition equations are given. NAS A's proposed MCSPS (Multichannel Communication Signal Processing Satel lite) architecture is used as a numerical example.