Evaluation of TCP Congestion Control Algorithms with traffic control policies in a PEP-based geosynchronous satellite scenario

Abstract

Much work has been done in recent years comparing TCP variants in many scenarios, including the satellite one. Some of these studies were carried out with the ns-2 and ns-3 simulators, which may give a good idea of the behavior of these TCP variants, although the results cannot be considered completely realistic. Some of the latest studies use virtualization to derive a variety of measures to test the suitability of Congestion Control Algorithms in a more realistic way. Such studies also take into account new variants of TCP, such as Google’s BBR. However, few of these works have evaluated the behavior of these variants in a scenario based on Performance Enhancing Proxies. Furthermore, no emphasis has been placed on those variants of TCP that try to maximize throughput and minimize delay, which is crucial in many services with low latency requirements. Our paper aims to fill this gap, offering a comparative assessment of the performance of these three TCP flavors: BBR, YeAH and CUBIC. We have created four different approaches to mix these TCP flavors with two traffic control techniques, including Active Queue Management (AQM) policies. To perform the testings, we have developed a TCP-Splitting satellite Emulation Framework (TSEF), a platform that allows us to evaluate the performance of TCP flavors on the forward channel of a geosynchronous satellite scenario based on Performance Enhancing Proxies (PEPs). According to our results, we can conclude that the application of AQM policies and ECN marks on aggressive TCP flavors like CUBIC is mandatory to maximize throughput and minimize delay.