Traffic offloading in a converged satellite and terrestrial network

Abstract

Rural and remote areas all over the world still suffer from the digital divide and limited access to broadband Internet connections. Despite ambiguous goals of many institutions, such as the European Union, operators are reluctant to deploy the same broadband infrastructure in such diffcult to serve areas due to economical constraints. Simultaneously, satellite networks evolved significantly during the last decade, so that they can virtually provide broadband connectivity everywhere. Geostationary satellites, however, introduce a high amount of latency in each connection due to their altitude of 36 000 km, leading to a negative effect on the end user's experience. Hence, a promising solution is to combine narrow-band terrestrial connection with high capacity satellite links to form a converged satellite and terrestrial network. The contribution of this thesis rests in the investigation, design and evaluation of offloading techniques, that allow for distributing traffic in a converged satellite and terrestrial network, so that the end user experience in rural and remote areas can be increased. Throughout this thesis, firstly the problem space has been investigated, so that appropriate research questions could be derived. Secondly, solutions based on these questions have been proposed and, finally, evaluated. The results show that a converged satellite and terrestrial network can be formed, in which traffic is effectively offloaded from the limited terrestrial link to the satellite connection. With such an approach, the overall network performance in rural and other underserved areas benefits significantly, so that eventually the end users' experience will increase.