Resource Reservation Protocol for Mobile Satellite Communication

The Internet Engineering Task Force is working on extending the traditional TCP/IP model for supporting multimedia and real-time applications on the Internet. Thus, new protocols have been developed such as the Resource Reservation Protocol. With the rapid growth of mobile networks, the IETF is also working on creating and extending the existing protocols to support mobile users. This has led to the development of Mobile IP. At the same time, there has been a growing interest in using Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. LEO satellites are well suited to providing services to mobile users. In the near future, mobile users will be able to access multimedia and real-time applications, so the new TCP/IP with real-time and mobile support will be needed to work over LEO satellite networks. This paper surveys the networking issues related to RSVP over (mobile) LEO satellite networks. It also describes different approaches for extending RSVP for supporting mobile satellite users.