ABSTRACT:

Broadband satellite constellation networks will be required to carry all types of IP traffic, real time interactive traffic as well as nonreal time traffic, warranting the need for appropriate QoS for these different traffic flows. In this paper we investigate advantages of employing constraint-based routing using MPLS in a multilayered hierarchical satellite constellation. Bandwidth availability or residual bandwidth on a satellite link is taken into account when setting up routes for high priority real-time traffic e.g. VoIP, which is sensitive to delay and jitter. Also to protect the VoIP traffic from being swamped by bursty best-effort traffic we propose to have a separate queue for high priority traffic. The performance of the prioritized load balancing routing algorithm on a multi-layered satellite network is simulated and analyzed.

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