In order to attain better communications performance rather than just expand coverage and save system cost, criteria related to the communications quality and capacity are extracted and revised to build an integrated performance metric system which aims to effectively guide the satellite communications constellation design. These performance metrics together with the system cost serve as the multiple objectives whilst the coverage requirement is regarded as the basic constraint in the optimization of the constellation configuration design applying a revised NSGA-II algorithm. The Pareto hyper-volumes lead to the best configuration schemes which achieve better integrated system performance compared with the conventional design results based merely on coverage and cost.