A Case Study in User Capacity Planning for Low Earth Orbit Communication Satellite

Nowadays, Indonesia as archipelago country is focusing on strengthening their competitive advantage in boosting the capability and development of satellite technology especially in providing communication link for rural area in Indonesia. Currently, low earth orbit satellites constellation is the best choice to complement terrestrial networks, and one of the most important process of the communication satellite design is user capacity planning. In the proposed design, user capacity planning became a determining factor whether the satellite is feasible to be implemented. With benchmarking to TELESAT Low Earth Orbit (LEO), this paper aims to calculate and analyze user capacity in proposed low earth orbit communication satellite design using throughput calculation. The result of this communication satellite planning can provide services up to 74,746 user uplinks and 9,753 user downlinks. This paper also explores power variations of the power transmission which able to confirms the feasibility of the proposed design, where the user capacity in the lowest power scenario is 25,299 user uplinks and 6,705 user downlinks.