Traffic assignment in communication satellites

A high capacity communication satellite interconnects scores of ground stations simultaneously. Under the Satellite-Switched/Time Division Multiple Access (SS/TDMA) system, each channel of the satellite is allocated to a pair of ground stations for a certain time period, after which the whole set of allocations (called a switch) is changed simultaneously. The problem the authors is to minimize the time length of the entire sequence of switches, subject to a limit on the number of switches. They formulate this as a 3-index bottleneck-sum assignment problem, and solve it by a heuristic that obtains consistently better results than earlier methods based on different formulations.