Behavior of Vegas congestion control over satellite channels

TCP Vegas is a "proactive" congestion control mechanism which predicts when congestion is about to happen and then reduces the sending rate just before discarding of packets gets started. The techniques of Vegas are expected to be very supportive to space communication which is dominated by frequent packet losses as a result of heavy noise. This is because Vegas is specially designed to minimize packet losses to achieve high throughput. However, very few studies have been done on its usage in space communication. This paper studies the behavior of Vegas over space channel by comparing it over the widely used VJ congestion control using the SGIS test-bed. It is concluded that Vegas achieves much higher throughput than VJ in error prone links such as satellite and wireless channels, which makes it more favorable over VJ in similar environments. It is suggested to use Vegas congestion control mechanism in space and wireless links with similar adverse conditions.