Traffic management in HSDPA via GEO satellite

Satellite systems are a valid alternative to cover wide areas on the earth and to provide broadband communications to mobile and fixed users. Satellite systems should be able to provide to mobile users the same access characteristics of the terrestrial counterparts. This paper investigates packet scheduling aspects for Satellite Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (S-UMTS) transmissions based on Satellite - High Speed Downlink Packet Access (S-HSDPA). A geostationary bent-pipe satellite has been considered. The performance of different scheduling schemes has been compared in the envisaged S-HSDPA scenario, considering video streaming and Web traffic flows. We have obtained that the Proportional Fairness scheduler with Exponential Rule (PF-ER) permits to achieve the best performance for video traffic. Moreover, video traffic traces have been used to evaluate the objective video quality achieved at the application layer, considering the physical medium behavior and different S-HSDPA scheduling schemes.