Modeling Dynamic Satellite Bandwidth Allocation for Situation-Awareness Applications

Dynamic allocation is a crucial issue when coping with satellite-provided services where many demanding users share a limited bandwidth. This is the case of situation-awareness applications, for example, where several users generate information (possibly multimedia) that must be delivered to a control center through a shared satellite link. In this context, bandwidth allocation should be adaptive so as to support differentiation in the treatment offered by the communication system to distinct data flows, depending on the specific criticality of the individual flows. In this paper we provide an analytical framework for modeling the performance of different approaches which can be adopted to face such a problem. As compared to existing literature in the field, the original contribution of this work is providing a general mathematical framework to support dynamic bandwidth allocation as a function of the criticality of the information being managed.