TCP Noordwijk+: An upgrade for a cost-effective cloud computing via satellite

TCP Noordwijk manages very efficiently Internet traffic when a satellite link is included in the path. The improvement of the bandwidth estimator can further increase performance, especially in presence of competing traffic using other TCP protocols, and the exploitation of innovative service paradigms, first of all, cloud computing. In this respect, a meaningful increase of data transfers with different requirements in terms of size and interactivity will be experienced and large bulk data transfers can imply congestion on the bottleneck link of the core networks, impairing performance of real-time data transfers. This issue is further emphasized when a satellite link is included on the path, since resources are limited and the large latency affects congestion recovery mechanisms. Flow control differentiation capability can be the solution to exploit cloud computing efficiently. In this paper, we propose to manage flows priority at the transport layer introducing a proxy agent installed before each satellite terminal exploiting cloud computing service, which can use different transport protocols and parameters according to the flow priority. The proxy includes the new TCP Noordwijk+ (TCPN+), which allows establishing efficient transfer of low-priority bulk data along with efficient handling of interactive data, keeping a degree of friendliness with existing standard TCP connections. The results, outcome of Ns-2 simulation, confirm the efficiency of the proposed solution.