Performance simulation of Tahoe, Reno, New Reno and SACK over terrestrial and geostationary satellite links

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is widely used transport protocol to provide reliable data delivery. It is the backbone protocol of most of the internet based applications. Importance of the TCP based applications in different networks with diverse conditions leads to the modifications and enhancements in basic TCP algorithm. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of TCP Tahoe, Reno, New Reno and SACK in terrestrial as well as Geo-stationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellite link conditions. For lossless scenario, all the mentioned TCP variants perform nearly equal but in lossy conditions performance differ. The simulation study brings out the appropriate TCP variant for the given operational conditions. The impact of high bit error rate (BER), path asymmetry and large latency of GEO satellite link over the throughput of TCP is discussed. Simulation results illustrate clearly the effects of BER and latency on throughput of different TCP variants. The results show that the performance of TCP-SACK is better than Tahoe and Reno for the satellite link conditions of the present analysis. Behavioral pattern and Performance analysis is based on simulation using OPNET Modeler. In the end, solution and suggestions are submitted to further improve the throughput performance for hybrid terrestrial-satellite networks.