Cellular communication system with efficient channel assignments and method therefor

摘要

A cellular communication system (10) forms cells (18) from low earth orbit satellites (12). The system (10) uses an off-line process (24) to identify cells (18) that fall within various reuse distances of other cells (18) and to save system usage statistics. An on-line process (42) associates a demand with each cell (18), and the demand is predicted from the system usage statistics. Need factors assigned in response to the cells' demands are ranked and processed by an inner loop that assigns the various ones of the cells (18) to one channel (22) at a time and an outer loop that performs the inner loop for many different channels (22). The inner loop assigns cells (18) to a selected channel (22) in accordance with the need factor ranking.