Communications via satellite introduces a number of new technical problems for mobile networks and applications. Satellite links have fundamentally different properties from terrestrial wired or wireless networks. Some of the properties include larger latency, bursty error characteristics, asymmetric capability, and unconventional network architecture. These differences have far-reaching effects on many satellite communication issues.
Internetworking and Computing over Satellite Networks's emphasis is on data networking, internetworking and distributed computing issues. The material surveys recent work in the area of satellite networks, introduces certain state-of-the-art technologies, and presents recent research results in these areas. A variety of issues involving applications, network architecture, medium access controls, multicast routing, asymmetric routing, transport protocols, TCP performance enhancement techniques, data broadcast, and information disseminations, are addressed. This is one of the first books to be focused on the internetworking and computing aspect of satellite networks.