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 possible. The most common satellite communications system in use today is known as Time Division Multiple Access, in which data from earth stations is buffered before being transmitted to the appropriate receiver on a satellite. Cycles of transmission are fixed for all stations. Since the same satellite will be used for routeing data in several different ways, a schedule must be devised to use the receivers, repeaters and transmitters on board to minimize the time needed for completion of a batch of work. This paper is a survey of current scheduling algorithms used for optimizing satellite communications resources. Apart from telecommunications, the methods presented here could be applied to more general scheduling problems with renewable resources but without precedence constraints.