Measurement and modelling of PlanetLab network impairments for Fed4FIRE´s geo-cloud experiment

Earth Observation with optical satellites is a key field in the space sector. In the last decade optical satellites technologically evolved to increase the resolution of the images recorded of the Earth surface. These systems acquire massive data from Earth recordings, and traditional data centers present some limitations. Cloud computing can overcome those limitations and increase the flexibility, scalability and on demand use of resources for processing, storage and distribution of geo-data. Such a model based in cloud computing highly depends on the network topology and on the network impairments. In this work we used PlanetLab Europe and PlanetLab Central to obtain realistic models of the network impairments to be implemented in the GEO-Cloud experiment deployed in Fed4FIRE, whose major objective is to value if future internet technologies can improve current operational Earth Observation systems.