Enhanced Wireless TCP for Satellite Networks

Satellite link is generally featured by long propagation delay, large bandwidth-delay product (BDP) and high bit error rate (BER). This tends to make the conventional TCP suffer from performance degradation in satellite networks. Thus Forward Error Correction (FEC) scheme is suggested for error recovery over satellite channel and RFC 2488 suggests that TCP does not reduce its congestion window (cwnd) for corruption. However, FEC decoder directly discards any unrecovered corrupted packets at the output. This cannot let TCP to use some useful feedbacks from the lower layers for improving its performance. This paper proposes an enhanced congestion control scheme, together with a handshaking mechanism between FEC and TCP, to improve goodput performance of TCP over satellite links. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme could achieve a better goodput performance, compared to the combination of conventional FEC and the existing TCP.