Evaluation of Skype Video Call with TCP Variants over Satellite Networks

During natural disasters, normal data communication gets affected due to destruction of communication infrastructure and excessive simultaneous access by huge number of people. Satellite links provide promising alternative to terrestrial communication infrastructure in such situations. Despite the disaster tolerance and wide area coverage, satellite links have their characteristic large propagation delay which may often affect the performance of data communication over such links. Hence, with a view to utilizing satellite links or networks during disaster situations, it is important to learn about the performance of desired applications in such environment. One application that is likely to be widely used in disaster situation is Skype video call. However, the performance of Skype video over satellite links have not been studied so far. In this paper, we therefore evaluate the performance of Skype video call over satellite links. Also, we also evaluate how packet loss rate affects the performance of Skype video call. Results from our experiments show that the throughput of the current version (desktop version 8.38.0.138) of Skype video call depends on both Round Trip Time (RTT) and packet loss rates.