In Yongguang Zhang (Ed.), Internetworking and Computing over Satellite Networks, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003.
Abstract: Advances in digital satellite communication technologies have allowed the use of broadcast-only satellites to provide Internet services. These systems, while having many unique benefits, bring about a new type of link technology -- unidirectional links. Traditionally, most Internet routing protocol designs and their implementations assume that every link is bi-directional. With these broadcast-based satellite systems, the assumption is no longer true. In this chapter, we describe the challenges of dynamic asymmetric routing with unidirectional links, and explain a practical solution that has been adopted by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force).