Characterizing Performance of an Intelligent Satellite QoS Optimization System

Countries with a vast range of intense weather conditions and broad geographic areas such as Canada can benefit greatly from the promise of advanced satellite and wireless quality of service (QoS) techniques. As these new services are researched and developed, their characteristics must be measured, verified and documented in order to ensure their design goals are met. This paper is about the design and development of a reliable automated network performance test platform that will be used to test the adaptive intelligent satellite QoS optimization system. A research team at Algonquin College, Ottawa Canada, has conceived and developed an original test platform, targeting the open-source Linuxreg operating system and development environment. This test platform will provide the performance data necessary to validate and optimize the innovative and unique algorithms that characterize the dynamic atmospheric conditions that can lead to signal degradation, thus enabling adaptive, real-time quality of service (QoS) for delivering reliable satellite-based services. The central component of this test platform, a program known as CommTest, will exercise the satellite forward and return channels using a number of typical traffic profiles (voice, video and data) between one or more ground terminals in order to extract and analyze key performance metrics. We illustrate the proposed test configuration of the device under test (DUT), the intelligent satellite QoS optimization system. The satellite encoding schemes of the forward and return channels are transparent to the TCP/IP protocol suite, and thus to CommTest as well. In this scenario, the performance of the DUT can be characterized in terms of simulated real world network traffic conditions as a 1^st phase of testing. The 2^nd phase of testing will proceed to implement CommTest on real satellite wireless networks at the Telesat site.