On the Impact of Link Layer Retransmissions on TCP for Aeronautical Communications

In this article, we evaluate the impact of link layer retransmissions on the performance of TCP in the context of aeronautical communications. We present the architecture of aeronautical networks, which is manly driven by an important channel access delay, and the various retransmission strategies that can be implemented at both link and transport layers. We consider a worst case scenario to illustrate the benefits provided by the ARQ scheme at the link layer in terms of transmission delay. We evaluate the trade-off between allowing a fast data transmission and a low usage of satellite capacity by adjusting link layer parameters.