Special Issue on Satellite IP Quality of Service (2003)

This special issue represents a timely and a valuable contribution addressing a critical research issue of provisioning Quality of Service (QoS) for satellite IP networks and systems.Satellite communications is an excellent candidate to provide broadband multimedia applications due to its several characteristics such as global coverage, scalability, broadcast and multicast capability, bandwidth-on-demand flexibility, and reliability.Due to the ubiquitous nature of IP for terrestrial networks, IP based services have been the prime focus for satellite networks supporting multimedia applications.Some of the recent technologies such as Digital Video Broadcasting-Satellite (DVB-S), Digital Video Broadcasting-Interactive Return Channel via Satellite (DVB-RCS), satellite ATM, and satellite IP have received significant attention from the research community and industry.The emerging applications like media streaming, content delivery distribution, and IP multicast for enterprise and consumer services are best supported by broadband satellite networks.As the demand for these applications increases, 'best effort' service is inadequate and results in lack of user satisfaction.The success depends upon supporting the QoS requirements for both real-time and non-real-time multimedia applications.QoS is the ability of a network element to have some level of assurance that its traffic and service requirements can be satisfied.From a user perspective an end-to-end QoS in satellite/ terrestrial network depends on the QoS achieved at each layer of the network based on satellite dependent and independent functions to be performed at the layer interfaces.The recent QoS technologies for terrestrial environment include Integrated Services (IntServ), Differentiated Services (DiffServ) and MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) traffic engineering.The applicability of these models for satellite networks requires research and experimental demonstrations prior to broadband satellite systems deployment.This special issue provides the status of the significant research on QoS for satellite IP networks and the current standardization activities.The first paper Quality of service for satellite IP networks: a survey by Sastri Kota and Mario Marchese surveys the satellite IP networks including end-to-end QoS requirements, objectives, and the current state of QoS technologies.Several QoS research issues of bandwidth allocation, delays, satellite TCP enhancements, and security issues are discussed.This paper describes a few planned systems and projects, standardization efforts by ETSI, ITU, and IETF, and isolates the future research areas.In the second paper A gateway architecture for IP satellite networks with dynamic resource management and DiffServ QoS provision by Luca Simone Ronga, Tommoso Pecorella, Enrico Del Re, and Romano Fantacci, a satellite network architecture is presented to provide QoS support for IP traffic based on the DiffServ paradigm, while minimizing the wastage of the valuable satellite resource.The performance has been evaluated in terms of throughput, packet jitter, TCP protection against UDP flooding and wasted bandwidth on the satellite link.