A Cross-Layer on-Board Discarding Strategy for Broadband Satellite Communication Networks

In many multimedia broadband satellite systems, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology is advocated to support integrated services. To improve the utilization of on-board buffer resources and satellite downlink, a cross-layer discarding strategy, ECTD (erroneous cell tail drop), has been suggested and theoretically analyzed by the authors. In this paper, ECTD is further studied through simulations. Unlike most other studies that use only one performance metric, we adopt two metrics - goodput and effective throughput, to respectively measure the transmission efficiency of higher-layer packets and downlink utilization. Simulation results show that ECTD could improve the transferring performance of on-board switch in measurement of goodput and effective throughput, and the improvement of effective throughput is much greater than that of Goodput.