Heterogeneous satellite-terrestrial technologies: Quality of service and availability testing

Due to rapid and constant evolution of wireless communication technologies, standards, protocols, applications, and systems, it is hard to rely on personal experience to make their selection, design and deployment. Testing helps to determine actual performance and limitations of technologies. Testing is also important to avoid the financial and reputation losses of the company as well as to ensure uninterrupted flow of the information for essential services such as healthcare, airports, railways, and military services. Testing covers many aspects of a communications network, including interoperability, conformance, performance and availability. The end-to-end quality of service management implies that features such as service scalability between different networks have to be available. However, wireless QoS requirements are very diverse due to its seamless applications, and moreover, , differences in QoS properties between both wired and wireless applications have a con siderable effect on the level of user service quality as well as platform and application dimensions of network interoperability. The aim of this paper is to establish the network performance and availability requirements for the integrated use of satellite communication technology together with terrestrial network technology in a particular, niche application area, namely the seamless delivery of educational services in rural and remote areas. The suggested testing programme aims to identify the performance and availability issues for the operation of heterogeneous satellite-terrestrial network technologies.