Design and Evaluation Guidelines for Bandwidth Allocation Solutions in Satellite Environments

Next-generation Internet infrastructures have two specific macroscopic requirements: ubiquity and quality of service guarantee. Satellite and wireless systems can easily guarantee ubiquity but, due to noise and fading, they may fail matching quality of service requirements. Bandwidth Allocation algorithms are often used to smooth the problem but they must be properly designed, tuned and tested before their employment. It is important to fix guidelines to orienteer the design to have a correct evaluation of the results in line with the objectives. The basic idea is that bandwidth allocation should be fair and efficient, but what does it mean? What is the definition of fairness and efficiency? The answer of this article relies on fairness and bandwidth utilization concepts, which are consolidated in the field, and on the idea of performance efficiency, proposed in this article. All of them may be translated in indexes that can be important to evaluate bandwidth allocation algorithms in satellite and wireless environments. This is exactly the aim of this article, which suggests some design and evaluation guidelines for bandwidth allocation schemes based on the mentioned concepts and considers some allocation methodologies proposed in the literature as a reference.