The role of satellites in personal communication services
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
A comparison of the IRIDIUM and AMPS systems
IEEE Network: The Magazine of Global Internetworking
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There are currently several commercial Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite systems under development that will provide worldwide voice, data, facsimile, and paging services. This article presents a performance analysis of the IRIDIUM® LEO satellite system, as several satellites become non-operational. The analysis is conducted using a computer simulation of the system. First, it examines the system's capability to meet real-time communications constraints of end-to-end delay and packet rejection rate with non-operational satellites. Then, it examines the effects of these non-operational satellites on a user's ability to access the network. The analysis is conducted at low, medium and high traffic loading levels with both uniform and non-uniform traffic distributions. The results indicate that the IRIDIUM® system is capable of providing real-time voice communications with several non-operational satellites. Both the loading level and the traffic distribution have a significant effect on the performance of the system.