Load balancing

摘要

A satellite communication system comprising a hub and plurality of terminals may be divided into multiple segments, wherein each segment may support part of the terminals. A method for decentralized balancing of traffic between the system segments is presented herein. One segment in each coverage beam may be designated as home carrier and include load balancing information. The terminals may be configured to tune on a home carrier, receive the load balancing information and then use it for selecting a least loaded segment on which they may remain operational until reset or powered off. In some embodiments of the invention, said load balancing information may be used for calculating relative probabilities for selecting segments through a weighted random selection algorithm.

主权项

1. A method, comprising:
receiving at a terminal of a satellite communication system a load balancing table transmitted over a home carrier; selecting one of a plurality of system segments in accordance with load information included in said received load balancing table, wherein the selecting is performed independently and without knowledge of segment selections made by other terminals in the satellite communication system, and without transmitting a load balancing request to a hub of said satellite communication system; selecting a bandwidth manager from one or more bandwidth managers included in the selected system segment; extracting from the load balancing table one or more descriptors corresponding to a forward channel corresponding to the selected system segment; tuning to the forward channel of the selected segment using the extracted descriptors; sending from the terminal a logon request to the hub; and selecting a traffic processing server from one or more traffic processing servers included in the selected system segment.