Reliable multicast transport of BGP for geostationary satellite networks

Initially deployed for TV broadcasting, geostationary satellite networks and DVB standards have become mature technologies for IP communications. Also used to interconnect wide IP networks, dynamic IP routing is required in geostationary mesh satellite networks. Nevertheless, terrestrial IP routing protocols are not optimized for satellite networks. Especially, as far as BGP operates over TCP at transport layer, it does not provide any multicast support and is not optimized for natural broadcast properties of satellite systems (e.g. DVB-S2), involving a significant amount of overhead and important complexity at the satellite terminal side. To integrate and interconnect satellite systems to the IP world, the use of BGP (as EGP) is required. Therefore, this paper analyzes the different ways to deploy BGP in DVB-S2/RCS networks and the opportunity to take advantage of a reliable multicast transport layer. A light, multicast and reliable mechanism to transport BGP4 is proposed and compared to the existing solutions.