Abstract
While satellite Internet bitrates have increased, latency can still degrade TCP performance. Realistic assessment of TCP over satellites is lacking, typically done by simulation or emulation, if at all. This paper presents experiments comparing four TCP congestion control algorithms – BBR, Cubic, Hybla and PCC – on a commercial satellite network. Analysis shows similar steady state bitrates for all, but with significant differences in start-up throughputs and round-trip times caused by queuing of packets in flight. Power analysis combining throughput and latency shows during steady state, PCC is the most powerful, due to relatively high throughputs and consistent, relatively low round-trip times, while for small downloads Hybla is the most powerful, due to fast throughput ramp-ups. BBR generally fares similarly to Cubic in both cases.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Amit Cohen, Lev Gloukhenki and Michael Schapira of Compira Labs for providing the implementation of PCC. Also, thanks to the anonymous reviewers and shepherd Srikanth Sundaresan for their thoughtful feedback on improving our paper.
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Claypool, S., Chung, J., Claypool, M. (2021). Comparison of TCP Congestion Control Performance over a Satellite Network. In: Hohlfeld, O., Lutu, A., Levin, D. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12671. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72582-2_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72582-2_29
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