Extensions of DBS and Hybrid Internet

J.S. Baras, K. Holleman, M. Karir, V. Bharadwaj, S. Papademetriou and N. Suphasindhu

2nd ACM International Workshop on Satellite-Based Information Services (WOSBIS), Budapest, Hungary, October 1, 1997.

Abstract

There has been a large amount of research dedicated to extending the asymmetric networks provided by receive-only Direct Broadcast Satellite systems like Hughs Netwok Systems' DirecPC(TM) product. One way to further develop Direct Broadcast Satellite services and to offset the high initial cost of these systems is to implement techniques that will allow one satellite receiver to act as a gateway for many clients to receive information. This would also help broaden the range of services provided by DBS systems. Besides providing direct-to-home traffic, DBS can be used to distribute bulk traffic to the local-loop distributers (direct-to-curb).

We describe some experiments which extend the DBS system, in particular, the DirecPC(TM) and DirecTV(TM) DBS, by using the PC with the satellite receiver as a gateway to connect networks together. We also discuss simple methods of receiving multimedia traffic from the multicast backbone (MBONE) [Cas94] over the satellite link, and distributing it, through this gateway, to end users.