A Congestion Control Middleware Layer with Dynamic Bandwidth Management for Satellite Communications

Historically, satellites have been set aside for what regards Internet connectivity; however, the interest in their usage to provide Internet connectivity is now rising again. Because of the growing demand for Internet services around the world, satellites can be an effective medium to serve scarcely populated areas as well as missioncritical communications. While the standard transmission control protocol (TCP) performs badly when employed on satellite links for the high propagation delay, when a number of client hosts are wirelessly connected to a gateway that forwards and receives traffic across such links, the major limit is represented by the channel condition estimation performed by the TCP through loss detection and/or acknowledgement-based timing information. This paper proposes congestion control middleware layer (C2MLC), a centralized and collaborative middleware with dynamic bandwidth management, that aims to improve performance and QoS for TCP flows in the aforementioned scenarios. Results of ns-3 simulations show an improvement in aggregate throughput, a significant reduction of latencies because of low queues occupancy levels, and higher fairness and friendliness guarantees among flows. They also confirm that C2MLC allows a dynamic and efficient usage of the bottleneck link, avoiding a waste of resources when some client nodes are unable to fully exploit their transmission potential