Quality of Service Solutions in Satellite Communication

This paper presents architectural solutions and results from an ESA (European Space Agency) study intending to mitigate the limitations of the current TCP/IP protocol stack in a satellite environment. Focus is done on the Quality of Service solutions to improve the fair sharing of the return link (based on the DVB-RCS standard) and to optimize this link utilization. A QoS-based approach (XQoS) is presented and adapted to the satellite context to map the user and application requirements toward services and resources available at lower layers. Experimental results of the QoS oriented architecture, done on a satellite emulation platform, are presented to demonstrate its effects on the communication.