ACCORD Broadband ATM Satellite Experiment (BASE) -DS3 Ka-band channel

A Broadband ATM satellite Experiment BASE was carried out between the Communications Research Centre, Canada and Rome Laboratory, USA during the period of May 95 to March 96. The objectives of the experiment was to perform a series of tests to characterize ATM over broadband satellite bearers. This document reports on the second portion of the first phase of the experiment that was conducted from July 95 to September 95 over the NASA ACTS satelliteKa-band. Tests consisted in measurements ofATM Quality of Service QoS parameters such as Cell Loss Ratio CLR and Cell Error Ratio CER as a function of Bit Error Rate BER. In this report, the results are presented for two different modulations QPSK and 8-PSK and compared against theoretical curves. Results show that Ku- and Ka- band satellite channels have similar ATM behaviour Results suggest that applications using ATM over burst error channel will experience greater difficulties for a given bit error rate than they would on a random error media. The characterization of the break- ing point remains, however application dependent. Moreover the broadband channel and its embedded sub-channels have been found to be coherent. As suggested in the first portion of the experiment, this result confirms that the characteristics of the sub-chan- nels can be inferred from the broadband channel and vice-versa.