Routing of VoIP traffic in multi-layered Satellite Networks

Broadband satellite constellation networks will be required to carry all types of IP traffic, real time interactive traffic as well as non-real time traffic, warranting the need for appropriate QoS for these different traffic flows. In this paper we investigate advantages of employing constraint-based routing using MPLS in a multilayered hierarchical satellite constellation. Bandwidth availability or residual bandwidth on a satellite link is taken into account when setting up routes for high priority real-time traffic e.g. VoIP, which is sensitive to delay and jitter. Also to protect the VoIP traffic from being swamped by bursty best-effort traffic we propose to have a separate queue for high priority traffic. The performance of the prioritized load balancing routing algorithm on a multi-layered satellite network is simulated and analyzed.