[en] The rapidly growing demand for increased data rates and spectrum scarcity in satellite communication systems require new paradigms to effectively utilize radio resources. Of many candidate techniques, carrier aggregation (CA) is a promising solution that combines multiple carriers across the available spectrum to achieve a substantial increase in peak data rate and improve user experience. The concept of CA was introduced in 3GPP standards for the terrestrial communication systems and has been successfully deployed and commercialized worldwide. Recently, satellite communication community has investigated the requirements for adopting CA technique to satellite infrastructures. In this setting, aggregating multiple heterogeneous satellite links to boost a single-user peak throughput requires an efficient data packet scheduler at the gateway in order to avoid the out-of-order packet issues and the subsequent queuing delays at the receiver side. Thereby, several research efforts have been devoted to circumvent this challenge through developing packet schedulers that are aiming at delivering data packets without perturbing their original transmission order. In this paper, the performance of the developed schedulers is evaluated using end-to-end system simulations to investigate the impact of different network metrics. The obtained results demonstrate the design tradeoffs and summarize the pros and cons of the schedulers.
[University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > SigCom >]
