Direct-to-satellite Internet of Things (IoT) solutions have attracted a lot of attention from industry and academia recently, as promising alternatives for large scale coverage of a massive number of IoT devices. In this work, we considered that a cluster of IoT devices was under the coverage of a constellation of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, while slotted Aloha was used as a medium access control technique. Then, we analyzed the throughput and packet loss rate while considering potentially different erasure probabilities at each of the visible satellites within the constellation. We show that different combinations of erasure probabilities at the LEO satellites and the IoT traffic load can lead to considerable differences in the system's performance. Next, we introduce an intelligent traffic load distribution (ITLD) strategy, which, by choosing between a non-uniform allocation and the uniform traffic load distribution, guarantees a high overall system throughput, by allocating more appropriate amounts of traffic load at different positions (i.e., different sets of erasure probabilities) of the LEO constellation with respect to the IoT cluster. Finally, the results show that ITLD, a mechanism with low implementation complexity, allows the system to be much more scalable, intelligently exploiting the potential of the different positions of the satellite constellation.
Keywords: IoT; machine-type communications; satellite communications.