Analysis and Simulation of the HTTP Performance over Broadband Satellite System

Abstract

This paper attempts to measure the performance of the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) (Fielding et al. 1997) in a broadband multimedia satellite communication system .The HTTP client’s access to the Internet is via a shared satellite uplink channel. The multiple access protocols we have chosen to simulate are Slotted ALOHA . We have constructed a detailed simulation of “web browsing” behavior using OPNET and have used this to simulate HTTP transfers over random access satellite channels. The purpose of this work is to determine if traditional medium access techniques are sufficient to accommodate many terrestrial users whose traffic patters are dominated by HTTP client-server behavior.