Scheduling for proportional differentiated service provision in geostationary bandwidth on demand satellite networks

The rapid emergence of multimedia applications in the Internet has highlighted the need for service differentiation in broadband satellite networks, which aim at being an integral part of the broadband network infrastructure. This paper presents a novel scheduler, called SWTP (satellite waiting time priority), to provide relative service differentiation in a DVB-RCS geostationary (GEO) satellite system where the network is structured to support a finite number of ordered service classes. We advocate the adoption of the proportional service differentiation model in the satellite domain to provide proportional delay differentiation to different traffic classes. The lightweight nature of the model makes it especially suitable for satellite systems as it minimizes computational cost by doing away with mechanisms such as admission control and resource reservation. Simulation results suggest that the SWTP scheduler can effectively and consistently provide proportional delay differentiation in satellite networks.