ATM on-board satellite congestion control for multimedia services

An ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) on-board satellite switch can be seen as a key network entity for the future global multimedia telecommunication systems. The main designing targets are: high utilisation of the network resources and QoS guarantees for multimedia services in the long propagation delay environment. To meet these requirements, a satellite ATM switch should employ robust congestion control scheme. Therefore, a new congestion control scheme for high speed multimedia services in satellite communication systems is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme uses a feedback control function based on the average buffer occupancy of the on-board switch. At every control time interval, the congestion control algorithm calculates the desired input rate for the ABR (Available Bit Rate) service class and tries to maintain the ATM buffer length below a certain threshold. At the same time, the ground stations adjust their input rates according to the feedback information. The suggested congestion control scheme was evaluated using the OPNET simulator.