Quantifying TCP performance improvements in noisy environments using protocol boosters

This paper describes a robust method of improving TCP performance for terrestrial and satellite wireless networks without modification to TCP or change in its semantics. Tools to transparently improve performance have been around for many years and many work even when the TCP header information is encrypted (e.g., IPSEC) or TCP acknowledgments do not go through the reverse path. Little work has been done; however, to quantiy how beneficial these techniques are. Using protocol boosters we show that reducing the packet size is critical as bit error rates get worse than 10^-5. We also show that over two orders of magnitude improvement in throughput can be achieved by adding redundant FEC packets, with well-chosen parameters for the number of data (k) and parity (h) packets in a block, and a small maximum encode time (t). It is important to note that we are looking strictly at enhancement techniques that do not require modifications at the end hosts as this can be a difficult task for the typical end user