THE EUROSKYWAY SYSTEM FOR INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA, OPERATING WITH FEED-BACK AIDED TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT

The paper provides, at first, a short description of EuroSkyWay, a multi-regional network of interconnecte d Ka band satellites being developed by Alenia Aerospazio, to provide innovative and affordable services to business and consumer end-users. Low cost and ultra small aperture user terminals are adopted able to manage packet and circuit switched data traffic, with flexible resource allocation on request by the user. To this purpose a novel on board traffic routing processor has been conceived, operating with "feed-back aided traffic management", to efficiently process a variety of data structures, e.g. Internet IP datagrams, ATM cells, MPEG2 packets, etc. , and consequently to improve the system marketability and profitability taking into account the unpredictability of an evolving market. The on board traffic router allows to maximise the traffic from/to the users, thanks to an advanced traffic management and control technique. Moreover a flexible carrier per beam allocation scheme has been adopted to guarantee a fast adaptation to both daily traffic profile and long term evolution of the traffic per beam. The paper describes, more in detail: service and traffic routing requirements, traffic management approach, on board processing and "ATM-type" switching.