End-to-End QoS Measurement over a DVB-RCS Satellite Network

Satellites play an important role in the future network due to their wide area coverage and for providing connectivity in remote regions of the world. This paper presents the end-to-end quality of service (QoS) measurements taken employing a European Space Agency (ESA) testbed over DVB-RCS infrastructure, in collaboration with University of Surrey, UK. The applications chosen for these experiments are file transfer (FTP), web browsing (HTTP) and video streaming. File transfer and web browsing require reliable transport mechanism as a corrupted bit will hinder the intact data delivery. Therefore, these applications use transmission control protocol (TCP) as the transport protocol. TOP involves a three way handshake, which introduces extra delay during data transfer. Video streaming is a real time application. It is time-sensitive and requires lesser reliability compared to FTP and Web services. Hence, it employs user datagram protocol (UDP) at the transport layer, which do not offer any guarantee of reliable data delivery but timely. The parameters that have been used to evaluate quality of service (QoS) are packet delivery time, file download time, round trip delay, packet sizes and packet loss. The paper presented measurement results and comparative analysis of the QoS of the applications over the DVB-RCS testbed.