Satellite communication in the Internet: Its history and the technology

This paper describes the history of the satellite communication technology used in the Internet. Satellite links have been used in the Internet from the 1970's. In the early stages of the Internet, satellite links were used to connects one node to another It was called a point-to-point connection. Today, several communication techniques and network topologies have been developed and deployed. This paper describes the history of satellite communication on the Internet. Types of networks are then summarized from a network topology point of view. In the last section, future directions in the development of communication satellite technology are described.