Abstract: A satellite communications system is described. The system includes a plurality of satellites, each of which transmits one or more forward links containing traffic to one or more terrestrial users. Each forward link of each of the satellites has a maximum radiation limit. At least one terrestrial user is capable of concurrently receiving at least two of the forward links. The concurrently received forward links redundantly contain the traffic addressed to the user. A computing center has a traffic controller for allocating the traffic to the satellites using gateways. The traffic controller includes a fading model descriptive of fading characteristics for each of the one or more forward links; a link performance model descriptive of losses in each of the forward links; and a power allocation model for computing a traffic allocation for each satellite of the constellation of satellites. The traffic allocation causes transmitted satellite power to be less than the maximum radiation limit for each link.