Performance Evaluation of end-to-end TCP enhancements for satellite links

none2Internet satellite communications are impaired by long RTTs and by segment losses on the satellite radio links. To cope with these problems, common to wireless internet communications, several TCP enhancement proposals have been presented in literature. The paper aim is to investigate the effectiveness of such modifications, when applied on TCP satellite connections. The focus is on two promising techniques, namely the TCP Westwood and the TCP Hybla (developed by the authors), which can be considered to some extent complementary, as they aim make TCP more robust against channel losses and long RTTs effects, respectively. Their performance is compared with NewReno plus SACK and Vegas, considering the presence of congestion and/or a non-null packet error rate on a reference network topology. Throughput, fairness and friendliness are the performance metrics, evaluated by means of ns-2 simulations. Results show that both techniques are able to introduce great advantages on TCP standard.noneC.Caini; R.FirrincieliC.Caini; R.Firrinciel