Performance Guarantees for Expanded Broadband Multimedia Satellite Services

Abstract

Today, many have attempted to provide multimedia services using IP over Satellite broadband infrastructure. The traffic complexity and real-time constraints of the multimedia services pose challenges to guarantee the delivery of packets end-to-end. At present, Quality of Service (QoS) in the router’s forwarding plane provides traffic differentiation capability in the traditional terrestrial networks. Traditional networking systems that implement QoS have packet classification and dropping mechanisms in the network edge and strong shapers and schedulers in the network core. In this paper, we clearly show that adapting the traditional QoS techniques to satellite medium will not optimize multimedia and other real-time broadband services. We also propose a new QoS architecture that provides a mechanism to optimize multimedia services over expanded broadband offering. In addition, we clearly establish in this paper using simulation results, that the proposed architecture is necessary to provide service guarantees for multimedia traffic over expanded broadband satellite networks. The results provided in the paper demonstrate that the proposed architecture has lower delay and jitter and higher packet delivery ratio compared to no QoS or partial QoS implementations.