An emulation platform for IP-based satellite networks

This paper deals with the design of an emulator platform mainly aimed to reproduce the behaviour of real satellite networks supporting dynamic bandwidth allocation schemes (DAMA). The most important feature is the extreme flexibility in configuring satellite topology, architecture and protocol stack of the involved elements (i.e. Satellite Terminals) and the test sessions. Configuration is possible through a user-friendly graphical web interface, and emulation sessions are actives and self-controlled, in the sense that variations of the physical constraints (i.e. allocated bandwidth) are internally managed on the basis of both time- varying traffic load and the pre-configured QoS architecture. Performance analysis of TCP-based applications over different configurations is proposed in the paper as a study case to show some of the potentialities of the emulator platform.