System and method of providing a medium access control scheduler

A method for downlink scheduling by a satellite included in a communication system, the method comprising:

• selecting a number of non-zero buffer occupancy user terminal/service-flow-identification (SFID) pairs in a round robin fashion from a plurality of user terminals to yield a set of user terminals;
• binning each user terminal of the set of user terminals into a plurality of bins based on a respective bandwidth requirement for each user terminal and based on a minimum user terminal grant;
• allocating a respective grant of radio resources in a downlink frame to each user terminal of the set of user terminals into a respective bin of the plurality of bins in an order associated with increasing bandwidth needs;
• generating, based on the allocating, a downlink map which identifies the respective grant of radio resources in the downlink frame to each user terminal of the set of user terminals;
• and
• applying the downlink map for data broadcasted to the set of user terminals.

A satellite comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a computer-readable storage device storing instructions which, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to perform operations comprising:
• selecting, from a plurality of user terminals, a first number of zero-bandwidth request user terminals from the plurality of user terminals;
• selecting, from the plurality of user terminals, a second number of non-zero-bandwidth request user terminals from the plurality of user terminals;
• binning the second number of non-zero-bandwidth request user terminals into a plurality of bins based on a respective bandwidth requirement for each non-zero-bandwidth request user terminal;
• allocating a respective grant of radio resources in an uplink frame to each user terminal of the plurality of user terminals into a respective bin of the plurality of bins;
• generating, based on the allocating, an uplink map which identifies the respective grant of radio resources in the uplink frame to each user terminal of the plurality of user terminals;
• and
• broadcasting, from the satellite, the uplink map to the plurality of user terminals.