Multimedia Conference over Satellite

Multimedia conference is one of the important applications in the Internet. To support such an application over satellite networks, one has to address quality of service (QoS) and performance of IP applications over satellite. Research has been carried to study how satellite networks can support efficiently the IP based multimedia applications including voice, video and data and impacts of satellite networks on these applications. This paper presents the results from the project IP Conferencing with Broadband multimedia over Geostationary Satellites (ICEBERGS), which is within the European 5th Framework IST programme. The networking architecture is based on Internet protocols, including IP, UDP, RTP and RTCP and the Internet signalling protocols such as SIP and SAP. A testbed has been developed to demonstrate the concept of multimedia conference over satellite and evaluate the performance of satellite networks and QoS of applications. The results from this project presented in the paper include IP based multimedia applications over satellite in terms of protocol architecture, satellite network configuration, and performance evaluation.