Integration of IMS and DVB-RCS for Interactive Content Delivery

This paper describes issues related to the integration of IMS and DVB-RCS satellite networks. DVB-RCS is studied as an access network variant for IMS in addition to the already known cellular, wireless and cable access networks. Although combining IMS and DVB-RCS seems a practical solution for communication and content delivery several issues must be addressed in order to make the integration effective. The main areas of research are quality of service integration and multicast integration. Specifically, integration of the IMS QoS architecture (PCC) and the control protocol (C2P) of satellite communication is studied, and also how IP multicast can be integrated with the satellite content distribution mechanism.