Evaluation of application performance for TCP/IP via satellite links

Research in the area of satellite communications covers many areas which were once considered as higher layer protocols such as TCP/IP, UDP, HTTP, FTP. The main reason is the growing demand for satellite networks to provide a wider range of services with the Internet service as the fastest growing satellite communication application. A number of commercial satellite systems have been proposed from all over the world targeting multimedia services. Currently most of the applications and services are based on the existing protocol such as TCP and UDP. TCP is at the moment considered as the main protocol that has to be included. Implementing TCP over satellite links has a significant impact on the performance of TCP and its applications due to various reasons as satellite links have many characteristics that differ from terrestrial channels. This paper discusses the Internet protocol architecture and applications over satellite and also evaluates their performance. Simulation results from the study of TCP over satellite networks are presented. This will give a clear indication of the level of effect that satellite networks have over TCP and some applications running over TCP. Also how some of the proposed solutions can be used to enhance and make TCP a more attractive protocol for satellite networks is discussed