Satellite-HAP Network Supporting Multilayered QoS Routing in the Sky

The main features of the future mobile communication systems are the provisioning of high-speed data transmissions (up to 1 Gb/s) and interactive multimedia services. For effective delivery of these services, the network must satisfy some strict quality-of-service (QoS) metrics, defined typically in terms of maximum delay and/or minimum throughput performances. According to this general vision, the integration of different layered networks play one of the most important roles in the telecommunication systems; for this reason, the paper explains the potential role of an integrated satellite-high-altitude platform (HAP) terrestrial system proposing a new multilayered inter-HAP-satellite routing (IHSR) algorithm integrated with an efficient admission control scheme in order to guarantee an adequate QoS to multimedia traffic connections. The performance of the overall architecture is evaluated through intensive simulations comparing the proposed algorithm with a previous classical routing scheme under several traffic load scenarios and network dimensions. The obtained results demonstrate the goodness of the proposed strategy in terms of handled active connections and inter-HAP link utilization.