TCP-swift: an end-host enhancement scheme for TCP over satellite IP networks

A new transport layer protocol called TCP-Swift is proposed for enhancing the TCP performance over satellite IP networks. TCP-Swift replaces the conventional TCP slow start and fast recovery algorithms by speedy start and speedy recovery. With speedy start, a TCP-Swift sender opens up its congestion window in only two round trip times. This significantly shortens the time needed in probing the network for equilibrium state. With speedy recovery, we can infer the cause of a packet loss by observing the ACK stream received at the sender. If the loss is due to wireless transmission error, the sender´s congestion window can be reopened up more aggressively to fully utilize the available satellite link bandwidth. We show that TCP-Swift outperforms existing TCP schemes by simulations.