Space-Based Voice over IP Networks

In human space exploration missions, there will be a need to provide voice communications services. In this work we focus on the performance of Voice over IP (VoIP) techniques applied to space networks, where long range latencies, simplex links, and significant bit error rates occur. Link layer and network layer overhead issues are examined. We posit that imposing additional speech processing latencies in the form of multiple frames per packet is tolerable in the space regime, and show resulting performance overhead improvements. Furthermore, we find that even with channel bit error rates of 10-5 and 10-4, the frame size does not severely degrade the original speech.