Study and performance analysis of transport layer mechanisms over LEO satellite environment

The paper concerns the study of transmission mechanisms employed in telecommunication environments, where LEO (low earth orbit) orbits are present Several investigations about novel network architectures have been produced in order to individuate the solution that meets all the network requirements and characteristics in terms of delay, reliability and speed. Two types of solutions are proposed: the first one, where the terminals are modified and no additional tool is inserted in the network; the second one, based on a protocol-splitting philosophy. This latter supposes to add special tools called gateways to improve the performance. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is then evaluated by using a software simulator that has been adapted for the communication in the different protocol architectures studied.