Performance issues of interconnecting ATM islands

Two unique characteristics of geostationary satellite links impact the performance of ATM connections. These are satellite errors (which usually come in bursts) and long propagation delay. Many satellite links also have a limited bandwidth compared to terrestrial optical fibre links. This paper identifies important performance issues that should be considered when implementing ATM over satellite including: ATM services via VSAT; physical layer framing; bandwidth efficiency; bit scrambling; error effects on performance of ATM layer and ATM service; and effect of satellite on user applications.