Abstract
This paper presents a novel Connection Admission Control (CAC) strategy for vehicular DVB-RCS satellite networks. Using estimations of arriving and departing traffic in each spot-beam our proposal aims to maximize user satisfaction and minimize at the same time resource reservation. Via GPS measurements, terminals periodically estimate their time to handoff and encapsulate mobility information within signaling bursts. Upon reception of a mobility update, the NCC (Network Control Centre) is able to estimate the amount of traffic roaming around the spot-beams as well as the probabilities that active terminals will eventually handoff. As a consequence, the NCC reserves only the necessary amount of resources for handover purposes in each spot-beam in order to minimize the percentage of connections forced to termination. No overhead is introduced for the implementation of our CAC solution as it makes use of the existing DVB-RCS signaling for providing the NCC with the extra mobility parameters driving the admission control module. Through an accurate ns-2 modeling of existing DVB-RCS signaling mechanisms, we demonstrate that our lightweight CAC scheme outperforms static channel reservation schemes in terms of handover failure rate as well as traffic prediction strategies using mobility information in terms of channel utilization.