Analytical and Experimental IP Encapsulation Efficiency Comparison of GSE, MPE, and ULE over DVB-S2

Transmitting variable-length network layer (IP) packets over satellite links with fixed frame lengths (or lengths depending on the ACM transmission mode) requires (IP) encapsulation. For DVB-S links with fixed-size 188-byte TS packets, MPE and ULE encapsulations are available. DVB-S2 provides a compatibility mode to pack TS packets into the longer base band frames (BBFrames). Thus MPE and ULE are also available for S2, as well as a native generic stream encapsulation (GSE), avoiding the double overhead of TS and BBFrame encapsulation. The present paper gives a short overview on the available encapsulation protocols for DVB-S2, and then provides a mathematical efficiency calculation model for these encapsulations, in order to allow for performing theoretical efficiency simulations. Comparison graphs of the efficiency values are presented, using both the efficiency models and measurements from real satellite traffic.