A Proposal for Efficient TCP Flow Control over Satellite Networks

Coventional TCP has several performance problems when deployed over long delay, high link error rate satellite connections. Long delay causes the TCP to open up slowly resulting in low bandwidth utilization. High link error rate affects the performance by slowing down transmission rate unnecessarily every time a data loss occurs. In this paper, we propose an efficient end to end flow control scheme, we name TCP Seamless, for TCP over satellite. Our proposal offers a fast opening up of transmission rate to effectively utilize the bandwidth as early as possible. At the occurrence of data loss, our scheme can determine whether the loss was caused by link error or due to congestion. In case of link error, TCP Seamless can restore the transmission rate in a transparent manner. Also during congestion, without violating the netiquette, our scheme can get more data segments acknowledged at a faster rate. The core of our proposal lies in probing the network using low priority data segments. Also we propose two new algorithms, namely, Express Start and Seamless Recovery for satellite TCP to attain our goals. Both operational description and simulation results show that our scheme yields the best throughput for TCP over satellite. Moreover, in doing so, it needs less overhead than its nearest counterpart, TCP Peach.

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