An Extension of on-Board TCP (obTCP) for Satellite-Terrestrial Hybrid Networks

NEtwork MObility (NEMO) basic support protocol (BSP) is the underlying mobility management protocol for on-board TCP (obTCP) originally designed for terrestrial on-board IP networks. In this paper, we have extended obTCP for terrestrial-satellite hybrid networks and compared its uploading performances with that of seamless IP diversity based NEMO (SINEMO), which is a potential candidate for these networks. In terrestrial-satellite environment, the challenge lies in designing appropriate protocol functionalities for three dissimilar wireless hops (Mobile Host ↔ Mobile Router ↔ Satellite ↔ Ground Station) in cascade. We have first described the modified protocol, then developed an analytical model to characterize its performance, and finally validated the performance model through discrete event simulation. Our analysis shows that obTCP (running on top of NEMO BSP) outperforms SINEMO, as long as BER is less than 10^-4, in terms of both end-to-end delay and throughput.