Abstract
In recent years, achieving world-wide multimedia wireless services has received wide-spread attention and is the most desired objective of service providers of telecommunication networks. Thus, a significant amount of research efforts is devoted to broaden the wireless services over the globe. In this context, satellite component plays a pivotal role in extending and enhancing the existing Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS). In this paper, integration of satellite communication systems with UMTS is addressed. Several integration scenarios are considered and their simulation results using Network Simulator (NS) are given. In particular, performance of integration scenarios is evaluated in terms of end-to-end delay and throughput of the system as a function of satellite orbits and UMTS configuration for a variety traffic applications (UDP/TCP) and traffic data rates. It is observed that Satellite-UMTS (S-UMTS) telecommunication networks provide acceptable delay and throughput performance. Also, due to the synergy that exists between satellite and UMTS networks, S-UMTS is a sound approach for delivering multimedia services globall