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In 1993, a proposal at the Japan-US Science, Technology, and Space Applications Program (JUSTSAP) workshop led to a subsequent series of satellite communications experiments and demonstrations, under the title of Trans-Pacific High Data Rate Satellite Communications Experiments. The first phase of which was a joint collaboration between government and industry teams in the United States and Japan that successfully demonstrated distributed high definition video (HDV) post-production on a global scale using a combination of high data rate satellites and terrestrial fiber optic asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. This was followed by the Phase-2 Internet Protocol (IP) based experiments and demonstrations [4–6] in tele-medicine and distance education, using another combination of two high data rate satellites and terrestrial fiber optic networks. The Visible Human tele-medicine and Remote Astronomy distance education demonstrations and their use of distributed systems technologies afforded an opportunity for people around the world to work together as a virtual team under one roof, using resources thousands of miles away as if they were next to each other. The visible human activity demonstrated global-scale interactive biomedical image segmentation, labeling, classification, and indexing using large images; the remote astronomy activity demonstrated collaborative observation and distance education at multiple locations around the globe and the transparent operations of distributed systems technologies over a combination of broadband satellites and terrestrial networks. The use of Internet Protocol related technologies allowed the general public to be an integral part of the exciting activities, helped to examine issues in constructing a global information infrastructure with broadband satellites, and afforded an opportunity to tap the research results from the (reliable) multicast and distributed systems communities. This paper summarizes the Phase-2... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the network architecture, engineering tests and their results for the Trans-Pacific Demonstrations (TPD). The experimental network was configured using an Intelsat satellite, N-STAR, and terrestrial networks in Japan, Canada and the United States. The TransPAC, submarine fiber-optic link was also used as a backup for the Intelsat link. We began to establish the full-scale experimental network in May 2000, and performed the engineering tests during about a two-month period of the TPD. We verified the connectivity of the satellite links, ATM connections, IP and higher layers, and then measured satellite link performance, ATM transmission performance, TCP/XTP performances and so on. As the result of the engineering test, we found that networks that include one or two satellite links can be used as network infrastructure for high data rate applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A high data rate (HDR) satellite communication system is essential for developing the network configuration of a Global Information Infrastructure (GII) because of its features, such as wide area coverage, flexibility of network configuration and multicast connection capability. From this point of view, Communications Research Laboratory (CRL) is conducting research and development of a Gigabit satellite system [1] that has an on-board ATM switch and gigabit-class capacity. We have developed a hardware simulator in order to investigate how satellite links influence on-board ATM switching and network performance, such as a long delay and burst error. In this paper, we describe the simulation results for the TCP layer performance and the SVC connection set-up performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]