CORDIS Archive

View the original page  Legal Notice

EUROPA > CORDIS > Archive

Advanced Search Maps

 

28425

Broadband Integrated Satellite Network Traffic Evaluation

Keywords: High Performance Computing and Networking, Simulation, Network Modelling
Technical - Application Characteristics and Users' Behaviour Modelling - Network Modelling (Terrestrial, Mobile, GEO and LEO Satellite Networks), Traffic Evaluation
Uses - Network Planning, Capacity Management, Optimisation, Impact of new Technologies
Industrial Application - Experimentation and Validation of Network Simulator Prototype

The ultimate aim of the information revolution is to ensure that everyone can have access to information, anytime, anywhere at reasonable cost. To achieve this goal, the emerging satellite technology gives a new perspective for a universal access to the broadband infrastructure, potentially alleviating the prohibitive cost of serving every user by terrestrial digital networks. Satellite-enabled personal communication services including two-way voice, fax, data, video, teleconferencing, multicasting and broadcasting are becoming increasingly affordable to residential, but also and more importantly, mobile users. Furthermore, by ideally complementing the terrestrial networking infrastructure and because of the possibility to integrate fast global telecommunication services into one single network, satellite communication appears as the key technology for the emerging "information society".

Besides telecommunications, distributed and multimedia computing have evolved over the last few years. As opposed to conventional computing and data communications, multimedia exhibits whole new classes of system requirements with respect to capturing, storing, streaming, transmission, synchronization and presentation, commonly referred to as Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. First approaches in coping with those requirements at the network traffic level have led to the evolution of an ATM-based Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN). These networks can not only support high transmission rates, but can also allow different applications or multimedia streams to be transmitted simultaneously in an integrated manner.

Terrestrial and satellite links will provide ubiquitous access to a plethora of multimedia services over B-ISDN and to the Internet. Geostationary satellites and terrestrial networks will provide access to fixed residential users and companies. For mobile users, it appears that a very promising solution is the installation of Wireless Local Loops (WLL). These access methods can also be combined with other existing terrestrial networks.

To efficiently handle multimedia applications across networks, and in particular through the air interface, appropriate network capacity management mechanisms are necessary. Network capacity planning is the practice of anticipating the networked users future needs, and designing and managing the network resources accordingly. Two key issues play a dominating role, first the characterization of the type and quality of service a user expects from the network, and second, the characterization of the type and quantity of load a user generates into the network.

BISANTE will characterize accurately these parameters by modeling and analyzing user behavior, and by developing models of network load and traffic as induced by user activity in future multimedia applications.

A network capacity planning workbench will help the European telecommunication industry to early identify complexity reducing the time-to-react to approaching telecommunication trends and hence becoming more competitive in the global broadband satellite communication market.

The workbench will include the future activities related to network capacity planning like sizing the network, allocating dedicated bandwidth, bounding latency, and guaranteed end-to-end QoS. Furthermore it will also allow for detailed network performance analysis like the evaluation of protocol designs, traffic shaping or the investigation of routing policies.

BISANTE will develop network system and network traffic models based upon profiles of user behavior. It will establish insight on how new multimedia and network computing technologies (like e.g. Java, CORBA and VRML) will influence network performance, and maybe alter user behavior. The mapping and implications of QoS parameters at various system levels (network-perceived QoS, user-perceived QoS) will also be investigated.

The means for network model evaluation are large-scale discrete event simulations. Appropriate approaches to the network simulation scalability problem is the use of parallel and distributed simulation techniques, where the simulation task is decomposed and assigned to a set of processors which execute subtasks concurrently in a coordinated way. A complementary solution is to slim down the simulation by abstracting out details under controlled risk, thus enabling modular, hierarchical simulations at arbitrary levels of accuracy. The simulation results will be compared with measurement results from a test-bed to verify the simulation models.

Investigations will encompass the characteristics of Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) and Geostationary-Orbit (GEO) satellite constellations, yielding modular satellite network models. The user behavior and application characteristic models will then be integrated in order to carry out simulations to verify that the application receives the level of service it requires while efficiently using the capacity of the air interface. The effects of the multiple access scheme (TDMA, FDMA, CDMA) and of the satellite link characteristics on the applications will be investigated to optimize the utilization of network capacity.

This page is located at /esprit/src/24950.htm
It was last updated on 29 October 1998, and is maintained by Merce.Griera-I-Fisa@cec.be