Home // International Journal On Advances in Telecommunications, volume 7, numbers 3 and 4, 2014 // View article

LEOCast: An Optical Multicast Protocol for LEO Satellites based on Optical Codewords

Authors:
Maha Sliti
Walid Abdallah
Noureddine Boudriga

Keywords: LEO constellation; all optical multicast; virtual multicast tree; structured codewords; tunable optical decoder.

Abstract:
Satellite networks provide worldwide coverage and support a large variety of services. Since Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites offer short round-trip delays, they are progressively becoming more and more important for real-time services, such as voice, data and video traffic. The majority of these services need a mechanism to deliver data to several receivers. In the present work, we propose the LEOCast protocol, which is an Optical Multicast Protocol for LEO Satellites based on Optical Codewords. This protocol can function in two modes: the first mode is based on the shortest paths and the second mode is based on the virtual multicast trees paradigm. The optical multicast protocol considers free space inter-satellites links that provide high data rate transmission for real time services and it is based on the optical switching concept using optical codewords. The two proposed multicast modes are compared in terms of the traffic load and the number of used decoding functions. It is shown that the optical multicast mode based on the virtual multicast tree concept generates less traffic and uses less decoding functions when performing the optical multicast process on each intermediate satellite. However, it is demonstrated that each multicast mode is adapted to a type of payload (packet/burst) depending on the required processing delay for each multicast mode.

Pages: 56 to 68

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2014. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 30, 2014

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2601