A medium access control scheme for supporting user mobility in DVB-RCS/S2 (*)

This paper aims at summarizing the work done in the SatNEx project for the development and the performance evaluation of a new access scheme for multimedia data transmissions in DVB-RCS/S2, applied to a mobile environment. The work has been stimulating because, as far as the authors know, this research topic has not yet been fully addressed in the literature. We started thinking about a realistic scenario of mobility, where services, uncommon for that type of environment, could be offered; once defined the scenario, we developed a satellite access scheme suitable for transmissions of TCP and video streams in mobility. In this paper, we present the reference architecture, the access scheme, the choice of the most convenient transmission parameters, and the simulation results we obtained when transmitting the two different types of data. Some conclusions on the TCP transmissions and the usage of interleaving turned out to be quite interesting.