ENHANCING TCP PERFORMANCE OVER SATELLITE LINKS

Abstract

The paper presents the study and analysis of performance offered by TCP protocol variants over GEO satellite link. The long Delay-Bandwidth characteristic of satellite network has big impact on TCP performance and it doesn’t fulfill the criteria for given QoS. The drawbacks of TCP may be mitigated in satellite environment by properly tuning some of the TCP parameters. So aim of this paper is to study different variants of TCP protocol in satellite environment and propose modifications to enhance its performance over satellite link. At this time, all mitigations discussed in this document are IETF standards track mechanisms (or are compliant with IETF standards) along with some suggestions by researchers. Effect of parameters like buffer length and initial congestion window has been observed here to propose modified version of TCP suitable for satellite environment. The experiment reported here has been conducted using FTP client and server applications running on top of TCP variants. The performance is measured in terms of throughput and overall transmission time over satellite link. The simulation results are obtained using NS-2 simulation package