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. <p>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. <p>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.<p>The split TCP connection over the satellite segment is then optimized.TCP congestion control is maintained on each segment of the split connection. <p>We simulated such an architecture in OPNET and present results showing improved throughput over the satellite link.