CNIT-ASI Project “Integration of Multimedia Services on Heterogeneous Satellite Networks”: experimental results

The paper presents an experimental approach to provide a guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) over a satellite network based on the Internet Protocol (IP). The aim is to get a proper environment for data, voice and video transmission to be used for tele-working and distance learning. The experimental scenario, where the tests have been performed, is composed of three remote LANs: two of them are directly connected through a satellite channel, the other LAN, located in a site where no satellite device is available, is connected through a 512 kbit/s ISDN link. The results obtained represent part of the experimental activity carried out during the second year of the Project “Integration of Multimedia Services on Heterogeneous Satellite Networks”, called “ASI-CNIT Project”. Several tests have been performed involving audio, video and data transmission. Both subjective metrics as Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and objective metrics, as video and voice packet loss, jitter and transmission rate have been used to investigate the topic and to get proper configurations able to guarantee an high quality of service perceived by the users (PQoS – Perceived Quality of Service). The Integrated Services approach along with the ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) has been chosen to reserve the network resources. The measures reported have been obtained by real operative sessions.