Aruna Jayasuriya1, David Green2, John Asenstorfer1,
1: University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes, SA 5095, Australia.,
2: Teletraffic Research Centre, University of Adelaide, Adelaide SA 5000, Australia. ,
Third generation mobile communication networks promise to provide a variety of high data rate services with higher Quality of Service (QoS) than second generation systems. Satellite networks, which will be integrated with terrestrial networks, are a major feature in third generation networks. Satellite networks intend to provide coverage for rural areas and to act as an overlay network in urban areas. These overlay networks can be used to support the users blocked in terrestrial handover. It is important to carefully analyse and dimension the satellite network to optimise the expensive satellite resources while providing the required QoS for users. Channel holding time of a cell is one of the major parameters that needs to accurately modelled in theses teletraffic analyses. This paper focuses on using Phase-type distributions of Generalised Erlang form to model channel holding in satellite networks. In this paper it is assumed that the traffic in satellite network is sorely consist of overflow traffic due to blocking in terrestrial networks. We also present the Quasi-Birth- Death (QBD) process that results from queueing models in satellite networks with Generalised Erlang service and exponential inter-arrival distributions. Further we investigate the optimum number of terrestrial cells that can be covered by a satellite spot-beam with a given number of channels.