Evaluation of DVB-RCS Resource Assignment Mechanisms for Internet Traffic Transport

The Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standards have greatly fostered the usage of satellite networks for provision of high capacity and quality data services. The DVB-S standard [1] defines a high capacity broadcast channel that can be received by a large set of terminals, and the DVB-RCS (Return Channel via Satellite) standard [2] defines the interaction channel for transmission from the terminals, whose usage guidelines can be found in [3]. Several satellite network architectures can be built upon these channels. One of them are the “star-like” topologies, based on gateway nodes transmitting over DVB-S channels to a population of RCS terminals (RCST) that interact with the gateways through the RCS channel. Other architectures are more symmetric and require the usage of On Board Processing (OBP) in the satellite, so that RCST terminals transmit on the RCS channel which is processed on board the satellite, including switching and remultiplexion to a DVB-S channel received by the RCST nodes. This arrangement allows single hop communications among RCSTs.