IEICE TRANS. COMMUN., VOL.E83–B, NO.2 FEBRUARY 2000 321 PAPER IEICE/IEEE Joint Special Issue on Recent Progress in ATM Technologies Integration of ATM and Satellite Networks: Traffic Management Issues Antonio IERA † , Antonella MOLINARO †† , Salvatore MARANO ††† , and Domenico MIGNOLO †††† , Nonmembers SUMMARY The design of effective traffic and resource man- agement policies is a key issue in the deployment of ATM-satellite systems. This paper proposes a technique of call admission con- trol and dynamic resource management to support ATM traffic classes in satellite environments. The effectiveness of the strategy is assessed by referring to the EuroSkyWay multimedia satellite platform, based on Ka-band payload and on-board processing. The main advantage is the effective exploitation of the satel- lite bandwidth by means of the statistical multiplexing of traffic sources and the guarantee of QoS provisioning to both real-time and non real-time, constant and variable bit rate sources. key words: 1. Introduction Today, there is growing attention to satellite systems as an effective means to extend the potentiality of terres- trial networks. The role envisioned for satellites within Personal Communication Systems (PCS) is significant and different from what they have played up to now. The emerging idea is to consider satellites no longer as bent pipes, which receive information on the uplink and re-transmit it on the downlink to the terminals within their spot-beam coverage [1]. The trend is toward the development of broadband satellite systems exploiting on-board processing and switching, medium access con- trol algorithms, inter-satellite link routing, etc. in order to effectively interconnect to terrestrial backbones [2]. In the USA, Europe, and Japan great effort is being made to develop prototypes of such satellite platforms, ready for future telecommunication scenarios. In an inter-networked PCS environment some ef- fort has to be put in to allow the satellite to support a wide portfolio of applications, ranging from mere tele- phony to data transfer, from video-on-demand to video- conferencing, from broadcast multimedia transmission to any other conceivable application with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS). The service categories defined for wired environments based on Asynchronous Trans- fer Mode (ATM), like Constant Bit Rate (CBR), real- Manuscript received May 28, 1999. Manuscript revised September 10, 1999. † The author is with University of Reggio Calabria, Italy. †† The author is with University of Messina, Italy. ††† The author is with University of Calabria, Cosenza, Italy. †††† The author is with Alenia Aerospazio, Roma, Italy. time Variable Bit Rate (rt-VBR), non real-time VBR (nrt-VBR), Unspecified Bit Rate (UBR) [1], need to be extended to the satellite scene to support the cited ap- plications. The next step is the design and development of suitable transmission and control techniques. With a view to guaranteeing PCS facility, wireless (terrestrial cellular, cordless, and satellite) networks are expected to be interfaced with cabled networks trans- parently to the user. In this context, satellite systems play an important role, thanks to their capability of extending terrestrial cellular network coverage [3] and providing both high-bit-rate access to information ser- vices and ability to reach world-wide users. On the other hand, the high-speed cabled network, Broadband- ISDN, based on ATM, is experiencing large diffusion, and it is very likely that it will become the transmis- sion standard for future communications. This leads to increasing interest in the topic of satellite-ATM integra- tion. We think that satellites need to provide variable bit rate and bandwidth on demand services in order to guarantee seamless integration with the ATM terres- trial segment. The major concern when deploying systems includ- ing the satellite component is about their ability to deliver service classes with the required QoS. Specif- ically, in the ATM-satellite scenario one of the main questions is whether ATM quality can be provided and maintained, and for what classes of services. Some in- trinsic characteristics of satellite systems could impair the performance of certain classes of traffic. Delay- sensitive (real-time) services, like high-speed computing and video-conferencing, can exploit the satellite band- width in a limited way, due to the long propagation delays typical of geosynchronous (GEO) satellite sys- tems, and due to the large delay variations of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Furthermore, contrary to wired optical networks, in which bandwidth and technologies are available at reasonable cost, the resources of a satellite system are very expensive, especially the satellite itself and the earth-stations, and typically have low redundancy. Thus, they must be robust and used efficiently [4]. For these reasons, the mere extension of traditional resource allocation and call management techniques to the satel- lite environment does not guarantee efficiency. An ex- ample is given by some conservative bandwidth allo-