The NATO III satellite communications system control

The System Control concepts to improve channel utilization and the recent progress of the design, development and integration of the Control Subsystem for the NATO III network are reported. The network operates with a large number of single destination TDM/QPSK/FDMA carriers to provide voice, low speed telegraph and medium speed data circuits. A power control algorithm to keep the link quality at the desired nominal level as well as improve satellite capacity and a traffic control algorithm allowing reconfiguration of the network to accommodate fluctuating traffic are presented. The System Control Software development cycle, consisting of top level design, which includes functional decomposition and software module structure, detailed design, integration and testing phases, is discussed. Various functional flow diagrams are provided illustrating the information interfaces to external communications, inter-component communications, the network database and the physical devices. An example illustrating the performance of power control and traffic control software is presented.