Empirical satellite spectrum occupancy modeling and testbed in the L-band

Communication systems such as satellite communication (SATCOM) systems operate in regulated frequency bands and are often separated based on the radio service to control the interference. The satellite-to-earth link can be studied using a software-defined radio (SDR) by capturing and storing the satellite data. This paper aims to create a methodology that can be used to capture and model satellite traffic in a desired frequency band. We cover the testbed setup to capture the satellite signals, the necessary processing steps to extract useful information from the captured data, and the spectrum occupancy modeling. The short-time Fourier transform (STFT) and density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm are used to packetize the captured satellite data. The holding, idle, and inter-arrival times were obtained to determine the occupancy rate and occupancy duration over a one-week period. Using these empirical quantities, satellite packet traffic was generated and compared to the experimental data.