Performance evaluation of SIP-based session establishment over satellite-UMTS

Session initiation protocol (SIP) has been selected by the third generation partnership project (3GPP) as the official end-to-end IP signalling protocol for establishing multimedia sessions in the IP based universal mobile telecommunication systems (UMTS) network. Since a satellite component has been identified within UMTS, there is a need to support SIP-based session establishment over satellite-UMTS (S-UMTS) as well as to achieve an end-to-end seamless IP-based terrestrial/satellite network integration. This paper aims at evaluating the performance of SIP-based session setup over the S-UMTS, taking into account the larger propagation delay over the satellite as well as the impact of the UMTS radio interference. It also addresses the issue of incorporating a link layer retransmission based on the radio link control acknowledgement mode (RLC-AM) mechanisms and examines its implications on the SIP session establishment performance.