Chang, Yu-WenGeraniotis, Evaggelos A.In this paper, we formulate the combined handoff and channel assignment problems in a CDMA LEO satellite network as a reward/cost optimization problem. The probabilistic properties of signals and traffics in cells are used to formulate a finite- horizon Markov decision process. The optimal policy is obtained by minimizing a cost function consisting of the weighted sum of the switching costs and blocking costs of traffics subjects to a bit-error-rate or outage probability constraint. A backward induction algorithm is applied to derive the optimal policy. Performance of the optimal policy and the direct threshold policy are compared.en-USLEO satellites CDMAIntelligent Signal ProcessingCommunications SystemsTechnical Report