ATM over satellite: analysis of ATM QoS parameters

We describe our investigation on ATM over satellite, where we focus on the impact of the bit error characteristics of a satellite link on ATM. We first analyze the ATM header error correction (HEC) mechanism and calculate the ATM quality of service (QoS) parameters such as the cell loss ratio, the cell error rate, and the cell insertion rate for a satellite link. This analysis was verified by experiments, where a good agreement between the analytical and the experimental results was achieved. We also suggest possible solutions to overcome the problems caused by burst errors.