Congestion Control in Satellite Networks

Congestion is a natural phenomenon in any network queuing system, and is unavoidable if the queuing system is operated near capacity. In this paper, we study how to set rules of a satellite queuing system so that all the users have self-interest in controlling congestion when it happens. Most of the mechanisms proposed to accomplish this in terrestrial Internet involve complicated packet scheduling algorithms. These algorithms may not be implemented in satellite router due to satellite hardware constraints or performance differences; thus, finding more easily implemental variants of such algorithms may be of significant practical value. After investigating characteristics of satellite traffic traces, we propose PA (Penalize heavy volume unresponsive flows and Avoid unnecessary bandwidth waste) to allocate bandwidth fairly and eliminate unnecessary bandwidth waste. PA is a simple packet dropping scheme and discriminates against the flows which submit more packets/sec than is allowed by their fair share. Game-theoretic analysis shows that PA could impose Nash equilibrium on selfish agents. Simulation results suggest that the design provides a good tradeoff between efficiency and fairness in a wide variety of operating conditions.