TCP performance on a railway satellite channel

High-speed rail is emerging in the world as an increasingly popular and efficient means of transportation used by a lot of people, who may also need a broadband Internet connection while travelling for their business and leisure. Satellite systems for their intrinsic characteristic, such as global coverage, reduced impact of Doppler effect due to link geometry and flexible bandwidth management, represent an excellent solution to provide broadband services in the identified scenario. Some problems specific of the railway propagation channel such as frequent signal outages due to the periodic electrical trellises, tunnels and steel covered bridges affect TCP/IP performance due to frequent packet losses occurring in bursts. In this paper, performance of TCP-based applications and error recovery mechanisms are investigated and the use of a new transport protocol named TCP-Noordwijk is introduced. TCP-Noordwijk leverages on a burst transmission and is particularly suited for the harsh satellite links. Results show that TCP-Noordwijk outperforms the other analyzed TCP versions.