Advanced Transport Satellite Protocol

Abstract

Mitigation of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)performance degradation over satellite has been extensively studied over the last two decades by the scientific community, which has come up with a large set of protocol and architecture solutions. This paper proposes a novel end-to-end (E2E) transport layer protocol, namely Advanced Transport Satellite Protocol (ATSP), which is built around consolidated control theory concepts already infused in Active Queue Management (AQM) control schemes. ATSP exploits the knowledge of the bandwidth allocated to each terminal, as available from the satellite network operator. Besides, the satellite network property of being completely under control allows the joint collaboration of sender, receiver and routers in order to acquire a complete knowledge of the network status and eventually optimize the overall performance. The performance analysis shows that ATSP achieves a fair bandwidth share for all the satellite users and outperforms TCP Hybla, which is optimized for satellite links, in terms of throughput.