US Patent 7584297 Soft diversity satellite gateway architecture

Methods and systems are provided for satellite communication wherein a plurality of geographically-separated apertures are controlled by a central controller that analyzes link availability of each aperture and then user connectivity is prioritized above a minimum user data rate, whereupon the gateway-established data rate of lower priority users is reduced to allocate more capacity to highest priority users, which are routed through available links in order to better optimize a gateway architecture, to reduce gateway costs and to improve effective performance in the presence of atmospheric interference events.