TP-Satellite: A New Transport Protocol for Satellite IP Networks

Abstract

As a result of the exponential growth of the worldwide Internet, satellite systems are used to support broadband Internet access. Existing TCP protocols perform very well for Internet access on wired networks. However, in the case of satellite channels, due to the effects of high bandwidth asymmetry, long propagation delay, high sporadic bit error rate (BER) and burst errors, TCP performance degrades significantly. In this paper, a new end-to-end transport protocol, TP-Satellite, is proposed for satellite IP networks. TP-Satellite replaces the traditional slow start algorithm with a novel super start algorithm. In order to distinguish congestion events from link errors, a new scheme is introduced, which is based on alternate transmission of different class priority packets. Bandwidth asymmetry problems are addressed by the adoption of a modified negative acknowledgement (M-NACK) strategy, which periodically sends M-NACK packets. Simulation results show that TP-Satellite enhances the throughput performance on the forward path, reduces the bandwidth used in the reverse path, and offers a fair share of network resources.