High-speed Internet access through unidirectional geostationarysatellite channels

摘要

One of the proposed solutions for increasing the speed of Internetnaccess is to connect the home user to a direct satellite channel, at anspeed 20 times faster than that of an average telephone modem.nCommunication over satellite links is often characterized by sporadicnhigh bit-error rates and burst losses. This is especially true whennworking in the Ka band, where weather conditions greatly affect linknavailability. Under such conditions, the TCP protocol that isnpredominantly used by data applications degrades dramatically innperformance. Using simulations, this paper studies the performance ofnTCP under different network conditions. Several modifications, that takenadvantage of the special properties of the satellite channel, arenproposed, and a new sender algorithm which can efficiently handle burstnlosses is presented. The main attractiveness of the proposed new sendernalgorithm is that it can be implemented only at the satellite groundnstation, rather than at every server in the world