Satellite-friendly protocols and standards

Abstract Due to the exponential growth of the Internet, the protocol suite of the Internet has become dominant. In the past, satellite communications systems used proprietary protocols. More recently, satellite multimedia architectures have been based on ATM as well as MPEG transport and multiplexing mechanisms. When the traffic is however mostly IP, then the transmission overhead will be significant in both cases. Therefore native IP satellite systems are preferable. In this paper a meshed satellite communications system is presented which is optimised for IP. An important feature is the support of quality of service. Typical applications are fast Internet access and multimedia services. Due to its flexible architecture it can be easily adapted for different standards.