Interactive Television Service over an IP/MPLS Convergent Satellite Architecture

Existing television oriented satellite networks have to evolve to support heterogeneous services. In this paper, we investigate a satellite interactive television system over a bidirectional link. The objective of the paper is to demonstrate the technical interests of an IP/MPLS convergent satellite architecture to support an interactive television service, focusing on return link integration issues. Therefore, we first investigate the main issues of adding a DVB-RCS return link and propose technical solutions. We describe then the proposed bidirectional architecture. In the last part, technical solutions are detailed to solve the main issues associated with interactive satellite networks. In conclusion, this paper proposes an integration of a satellite return link in a convergent architecture which can ease evolution, flexibility and new services deployment. Future works will deal with new services integration or regenerative satellite.