Impact of CF-DAMA on TCP via satellite performance

DVB-RCS terminals wishing to send data to a ground hub station via satellite must request return link capacity (one or more MF-TDMA slots) which is subsequently allocated using a CF-DAMA protocol. Unused capacity is distributed to terminals as free capacity. Results show that TCP performance can be significantly impacted when FCA is distributed between terminals having previously negotiated CRA or RBDC. CF-DAMA algorithms should target FCA to terminals without existing capacity or to terminals having requested VBDC. Other results show the performance gains of increasing the return link bandwidth, which can be used for network dimensioning and the impacts of different initial RTO for DVB-RCS systems