Impact of burst errors on ATM over satellite-analysis and experimental results

We describe the analysis and the experimental results of our investigation on ATM over satellite. We focus on the impact of the bit error characteristics of a satellite link on ATM. We first analyze the ATM header error correction (HEC) mechanism and calculate the ATM quality of service (QoS) parameters such as the cell loss ratio, the cell error rate, and the cell insertion rate for the bursty error-behavior of the satellite link. We describe the setup and the results of experiments on ATM over satellite which were performed at the RACE EXPLOIT testbed in Basel, Switzerland in May 1994. The main goal of the experiments was the measurement of the ATM cell loss ratio and the cell insertion rate with a satellite link simulator. A good agreement between the experimental and the theoretical results was achieved. Finally we suggest possible solutions to overcome the problems caused by burst errors