Throughput and Delay Performance of Mobile Internet Applications Using LEO Satellite Access

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites are an essential complement of the cellular radio infrastructure, especially the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), for mobile (pedestrian and, more important, vehicular) access to the Internet in sparsely populated areas, where high bandwidth UMTS cells cannot be economically deployed. LEO users would eventually switch between the satellite segment and the terrestrial one depending on the environment in which they are located. In this paper we analyze various mobile Internet applications in representative urban scenarios for two existing LEO systems. To this end, we develop a LEO channel propagation model that includes shadowing from surrounding building skylines, based on actual data in a built-up area. We consider “single satellite hop” transmissions from the mobile terminal to the satellite gateway. For this scenario, we compute via simulation the performance for FTP and HTTP applications as perceived by mobile users traveling at varying speeds along “urban canyons”. We then consider a multi-hop satellite path between remote urban locations and evaluate the performance of delay sensitive applications. We also evaluate the performance of various TCP versions (Tahoe, Reno, SACK) in different presence of packet loss.

[1]  V. Jacobson,et al.  Congestion avoidance and control , 1988, SIGCOMM '88.

[2]  R. J. Leopold,et al.  Low-earth orbit global cellular communications network , 1991, ICC 91 International Conference on Communications Conference Record.

[3]  A. Viterbi,et al.  The Globalstar mobile satellite system for worldwide personal communications , 1993 .

[4]  Larry L. Peterson,et al.  TCP Vegas: End to End Congestion Avoidance on a Global Internet , 1995, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[5]  Mark Allman,et al.  An Application-Level solution to TCP''s Satellite Inefficiencies , 1996 .

[6]  Sally Floyd,et al.  TCP Selective Acknowledgment Options , 1996, RFC.

[7]  Janey C. Hoe,et al.  Improving the start-up behavior of a congestion control scheme for TCP , 1996, SIGCOMM '96.

[8]  T. J. Shepard,et al.  TCP/IP performance over satellite links , 1997, IEEE Netw..

[9]  Mark Allman,et al.  TCP Performance over Satellite Links , 1997 .

[10]  W. Richard Stevens,et al.  TCP Slow Start, Congestion Avoidance, Fast Retransmit, and Fast Recovery Algorithms , 1997, RFC.

[11]  Donal O'Mahony UMTS: The Fusion of Fixed and Mobile Networking , 1998, IEEE Internet Comput..

[12]  Hyoung-Kee Choi,et al.  A behavioral model of Web traffic , 1999, Proceedings. Seventh International Conference on Network Protocols.

[13]  K. K. Ramakrishnan,et al.  A Proposal to add Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP , 1999, RFC.

[14]  Mark Allman,et al.  Enhancing TCP Over Satellite Channels using Standard Mechanisms , 1999, RFC.

[15]  Sami F. Sheeshia,et al.  Internet access via LEO satellite networks: TCP/IP or ATM? , 1999, Seamless Interconnection for Universal Services. Global Telecommunications Conference. GLOBECOM'99. (Cat. No.99CH37042).

[16]  Alan Kai-Hau Yeung,et al.  The design and implementation of a WWW traffic generator , 2000, Proceedings Seventh International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (Cat. No.PR00568).

[17]  John S. Heidemann,et al.  Ongoing TCP Research Related to Satellites , 2000, RFC.

[18]  Mario Gerla,et al.  TCP Westwood: congestion control with faster recovery , 2001 .

[19]  M. Gerla,et al.  TCP VIA SATELLITE CONSTELLATIONS , 2002 .