TCP over Satellite Hybrid Networks: A Survey

Xiaoming Zhou and John S. Baras

Number: CSHCN TR 2002-15, Year: 2002, Advisor: John S. Baras

Abstract

Satellite is going to play an important role in the global information infrastructure. Satellite canprovide direct to home Internet service (i.e. DirecPC from Hughes Network System) and it can alsoserve as traffic trunk in the middle of the network. About 98 percent of the Internet traffic is TCPtraffic. TCP works well in the terrestrial fiber network. However, in the satellite hybrid networks,because of the long propagation delay, large bandwidth-delay product, high bit error rate anddownstream/upstream bandwidth asymmetry, TCP performance degrades dramatically. This paperaddresses the problems of TCP in satellite data networks and reviews the proposed solutions in theliterature. For each solution, the advantages and disadvantages are pointed out. In addition,extensive simulations have been done for the proxy based scheme currently used in the industry tofind out how and to what extent the enhancements, such as connection splitting, window scalingand selective acknowledgement, benefit the TCP throughput.