You certainly remember this song from the 80’s (but do you ?) featured by RAH Band.

For your recollection, here is the lyrics plot: a wife calls her husband who is on space mission close to Mars. The voice call goes through a deep space link which – this is lovingly old fashioned – is established by an “intergalactic operator”. After a couple of chit-chat, because of “violent storm conditions in the asteroid belt” the voice call is shut down. End of the story.

Assuming that we are referring to a Voice over IP link, “Clouds across the Moon”  raises an interesting point. How robust are these space VoIP communications when faced with fading, jitter and other impairments ? This is precisely the problem that Alexandre V. and Gaëtan F. have been tackling during project #3 “Applications & services”.

They set up a complete VoIP system with PABX and IP phones, fed the resulting trafic in our satellite channel emulator and did quite an extensive study about qualitative and quantitative performance.

Everything is summarised in their e-report.  It is certainly worth reading it, as their work is simply awesome.