TCP-STAR: TCP Congestion Control Method for Satellite Internet

Hiroyasu OBATA
Kenji ISHIDA
Satoru TAKEUCHI
Shouta HANASAKI

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E89-B    No.6    pp.1766-1773
Publication Date: 2006/06/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1093/ietcom/e89-b.6.1766
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Network
Keyword: 
TCP congestion control method,  satellite Internet,  throughput,  

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Summary: 
Satellite Internet is one of the most important networks for emergency communications because of its tolerant of disasters such as earthquake. Therefore, satellite Internet has received considerable attention over recent years. However, most standard implementations of TCP congestion control method perform poorly in satellite Internet due to its high bit error rate and long propagation delay. This paper proposes a new TCP congestion control method called TCP-STAR to improve the throughput over satellite Internet. TCP-STAR has three new mechanisms, namely Congestion Window Setting (CWS) based on available bandwidth, Lift Window Control (LWC), and Acknowledgment Error Notification (AEN). CWS can resist the reduction of the transmission rate when data losses are caused by bit error. LWC is able to increase the congestion window quickly based on the estimated available bandwidth. AEN can avoid the reduction of the throughput by mis-retransmission of data. The mis-retransmission is caused by ack losses or delay. Simulations show that TCP-STAR can obtain the best throughput comparing with other TCP variants (TCP-J and TCP-WestwoodBR). Furthermore, we found that the fairness of TCP-STAR is a little lower than that of TCP-WestwoodBR. However, the fairness of TCP-STAR is equal to TCP-J.