A Simulation Study of Enhanced TCP/IP Gateways for Broadband Internet over Satellite

Abstract

The demand for Internet bandwidth has been growing rapidlyover the years and the use of high-bandwidth satellites has been proposed as one possible solution to meet the increasingdemand. However, there are certain performance problems withproviding Internet over satellite due to the nature of TCP/IP protocol suite and the satellite link characteristics. In this paper, we describe a simulation study of an architecture for improving the performance of TCP/IP over satellite links. On each end of the satellite link, there are gateways that split the TCP connection so that the satellite link is transparent to the end hosts.The split TCP connection over the satellite segment is then optimized.TCP congestion control is maintained on each segment of the split connection. We simulated such an architecture in OPNET and present results showing improved throughput over the satellite link.