A New Transmission Control Protocol for Satellite Networks

Liang Yu, Gang Zhou

.

DOI: 10.4236/ijcns.2011.44031                

Abstract

According to technical statistics, current TCP protocols with approximately 80% Internet applications run on perform very well on wired networks. However, due to the effects of long propagation delay, great bandwidth asymmetry, high sporadic Bit Error Rate (BER) and etc., TCP performance degrades obviously on the satellite communication networks. To avoid the problems, TP-S, a novel transport control protocol, is introduced for satellite IP networks. Firstly, in order to increase the increment speed of Congestion Window (cwnd) at the beginning of data transmission, the traditional Slow Start strategy is replaced by a new strategy, known as Super Start. Secondly, a new packet lost discriminated scheme based on IP packets alternately sending with different priority is used in the protocol to decouple congestion decision from errors. Thirdly, bandwidth asymmetry problem is avoided by adopting Modified NACK (M-NACK) in receiving ends, which is sent periodically. In addition, the sending strategy in routers is also modified along with other’s changes to support the protocol. Finally, the simulation experiments show that the new protocol can not only significantly enhance throughput performance, but also reduce sharply bandwidth used in the reverse path as compared with traditional TCP protocols and those protocols, which are recently proposed for satellite IP networks.

Keywords

Satellite Communication, TCP, Long Propagation Delay, Bandwidth Asymmetry

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

[1]	V. Jacobson, “Congestion Avoidance and Control,” Computer Communication Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, 1988, pp. 314-329. doi:10.1145/52325.52356
[2]	M. Allman, V. Paxson and W. Stevens, “TCP Congestion Control,” RFC 2581, 1999, pp. 1-5.
[3]	S. Floyd and T. Henderson, “The NewReno Modification to TCP’s Fast Recovery Algorithm,” RFC 2582, 1999.
[4]	C. Partridge and T. Shepard, “TCP/IP Performance over Satellite Links,” IEEE Network Magazine, Vol. 11, No. 5, 1997, pp. 44-49. doi:10.1109/65.620521
[5]	A. Jamalipour and T. Tung, “The Role of Satellites in Global IT: Trends and Implications,” Personal Communications, IEEE, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2001. pp. 5-11.
[6]	M. Allman, D. Glover and L. Sanchez, “Enhancing TCP Over Satellite Channels Using Standard Mechanisms,” RFC 2488, 1999.
[7]	T. V. Lakshman and U. Madhow, “The Performance of TCP/IP for Networks with High Bandwidth-Delay Products and Random Loss,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1997, pp. 336-350. doi:10.1109/90.611099
[8]	E. Lutz, et al., “The Land Mobile Satellite Communication Channel-Recording, Statistics, and Channel Model,” IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, Vol. 40, No. 2, 1991, pp. 375-386. doi:10.1109/25.289418
[9]	H. Balakrishnan, V. Padmanabhan and R. Katz, “The Effects of Asymmetry on TCP Performance,” Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE Mobile Computing Conference, Budapest, 26-30 September 1997, pp. 77-89.
[10]	J. Border, M. Kojo and J. Griner, “Performance Enhancing Proxies Intended to Mitigate Link Related Degradations,” RFC 3135, June 2001.
[11]	M. Allman, S. Dawkins and D. Glover, “Ongoing TCP Research Related to Satellites,” RFC 2760, 2000.
[12]	M. Mathis, J. Mahdavi and S. Floyd, “TCP Selective Acknowledgment Options,” RFC 2018, 1996.
[13]	H. Balakrishnan, S. Seshan, E. Amir and R. H. Katz, “Improving TCP/IP Performance Over Wireless Networks,” Proceedings of ACM Mobile computing, California, 13-15 November 1995, pp. 2-15.
[14]	M. Mario, R. Michele and M. Giacomo, “PETRA: Performance Enchancing Transport Architecture for Satellite Communications,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2004, pp. 320-332. doi:10.1109/JSAC.2003.819981
[15]	M. Luglio, et al., “On-Board Satellite ‘Split TCP’ Proxy,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2004, pp. 362-370.
[16]	V. N. Padmanabhan and R. Katz, “TCP Fast Start: A Technique for Speeding Up Web Transfer,” Proceedings of IEEE GLOBECOM Internet Mini-Conference, Sydney, 8-12 November 1998, pp. 41-46.
[17]	I. F. Akyildiz, M. Giacomo and P. Sergio, “TCP-Peach: A New Congestion Control Scheme for Satellite IP Networks,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2001, pp. 307-321.
[18]	I. F. Akyildiz, X. Zhang, and J. Fang, “TCP-Peach+: Enhancement of TCP Peach for Satellite IP Networks,” IEEE Communications Letters, Vol. 6, No. 7, 2002, pp. 303-305. doi:10.1109/LCOMM.2002.801317
[19]	T. R. Henderson and R. H. Katz, “Transport Protocols for Internet Compatible Satellite Networks,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 17, No. 2, 1999, pp. 326-344. doi:10.1109/49.748815
[20]	D. Katabi, M. Handley and C. Rohrs, “Congestion Control for High Bandwidth Delay Product Networks,” Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Applications, Pittsburgh, 19-23 August 2002, pp. 1-14. doi:10.1145/633025.633035
[21]	C. Casetti, et al., “TCP Westwood: Bandwidth Estimation for Enhanced Transport over Wireless Link,” Proceedings of Mobile computing, Rome, 16-21 July 2001, pp. 287-297.