Achieving bounded delay on a time-varying satellite uplink

In this paper, we investigate the packet transmission delay in a time varying satellite uplink. Specifically, we are interested in bounding the packet transmission delay within the terminal router for uplink traffic in a future satellite network. Previous work has provided delay bounds for wireline networks with a fixed transmission rate. However, these bounds do not apply to the time-varying satellite link that we are considering here. It has been shown that the terminal router in a future SATCOM terminal can accommodate the varying uplink RF data rate by using Ethernet pause frames. We show that by encapsulating the pause frame information into two parameters: a window size and the minimum transmission time within a window, we are able to achieve a guaranteed packet transmission delay. We also quantify the tradeoff between the packet transmission delay and the throughput on the uplink. Experiments with a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Juniper M120 router were conducted to verify the delay bound.