A Gateway Architecture for IP Satellite Networks with Dynamic Resource Management and DiffServ QoS Provision

Satellites are the perfect candidates to provide high quality IP services and they prove to be cost-effective when the coverage area is large or the population is sparse. Some difficulties exist, however, to implement IP based transport mechanisms on geostationary satellite networks. TCP based protocols are affected by the large delay-bandwidth product, a typical scenario for GEO satellites deliver- ing large bandwidth services. Also the coexistence of UDP and TCP traffic causes performance degradation; the dependence of TCP performance from UDP makes it very difficult to provide a suitable pricing policy for both. One solution is to design the communication system overestimating the requested capacity, but unfortunately the satellite bandwidth is extremely limited and the deployment costs of a satellite system do not allow waste of resources. For this reason an efficient resource management technique has to be integrated with the QoS support to obtain the two main goals of spectrum efficiency and user quality of service.