Quality-of-service-oriented media access control for advanced mobile multimedia satellite systems

Satellite networks offer a number of desirable characteristics including wide area coverage, unique broadcast capabilities, the ability to communicate with hand-held devices, and low cost-per-minute access time, among others. Low earth orbit (LEO) satellites are expected to support multimedia traffic and to provide their users with the appropriate quality of service (QoS). However, the limited bandwidth of the satellite channel, satellite rotation around the Earth and mobility of end-users makes QoS provisioning a challenging task. The main contribution of this work is to investigate the efficiency of various known MAC protocols in a predefined satellite network environment by using a unified analysis and methodology. Our principle objective is to define a variable bandwidth MAC protocol improving satellite network uplink performances and to develop a technology of adaptive long-delay adaptive distributed MAC control of QoS.