Congestion Control for Adaptive Satellite Communication Systems Using Intelligent Systems

Broadband satellite based IP network congestion control is becoming a serious issue towards commitment of service level agreements (SLAs) to honor the guaranteed quality of service (QoS). In satellite communication systems, the channel performance might be severely degraded due to the dynamic weather conditions leading to network congestion. The inherent large bandwidth-delay product of satellite channels impede the existing numerous congestion control schemes to be applied to satellite networks. In this paper, a new congestion index is defined to indicate the degree of the network congestion as a function of queue and weather characteristics. A novel intelligent packet dropping mechanism is designed based on fuzzy logic. Simulation results and analyses show that the newly developed congestion control method is effective and efficient for broadband satellite-based IP networks.