QUALITY OF SERVICE (QoS) FOR TCP AND UDP TRAFFIC OVER MULTIMEDIA SATELLITE NETWORKS WITH DIFFERENTIATED SERVICES

The next generation satellite communication system falls into three categories: broadcast system; beam switched bent pipe, also known as "network access" system; and packet switched on-board processing systems. Many of these proposed satellite networks use geostationary orbit (GSO) and non-geostationary orbits (NGSO), e.g., medium earth orbit (MEO) and low earth orbit (LEO) constellations. Exponential growth of internet hosts, and the proliferation of new user applications warrant the development of new internet infrastructure. Due to the fundamental satellite system characteristics global coverage, broadcast nature, and bandwidth on demand, satellite system is an excellent candidate for providing high data rate internet access and global connectivity accommodating the multimedia applications. However, to meet this goal, provisioning of quality-of- service (QoS) within the advanced satellite network system is the critical requirement. In this paper, we present broadband GEO and MEO satellite network QoS models and simulated performance results. We discuss the TCP flow aggregates performance for their good behavior in the presence of competing UDP flow aggregates in the same assured forwarding. We identify several factors that affect the performance in the mixed environments and quantify their effects using a full factorial design of experiment methodology.