The impact of TCP-IP header compression on performance over satellite links

There are hardly any experimental results seen in support of the discussions on the impact of TCP-IP Van Jacobson header compression (VJHC) in harsh environments. This paper studies the impact of VJHC over geohop satellite channels based on realistic experiments using a test-bed. The results show that enabling VJHC would result in performance degradation in a high-BER environment and suggests that it is better to disable it when the transmission condition becomes harsh. In addition, TCP-IP with VJHC disabled is less sensitive to the increase of BER but is more sensitive to the decrease of acknowledgment channel-rate compared to TCP-IP with VJHC enabled. Considering many similarities between satellite and wireless environments when observed from the perspective of network protocols, the results are also expected to be useful in wireless community.