Estimation of packet losses due to propagation impairments: Application to TCP performance over satellite

摘要

The transmission control protocol (TCP) is widely used to provide reliable data transmission due to its congestion and flow control mechanisms that provide reliable error recovery in higher layers. In satellite links, various atmospheric phenomena may lead to high packet loss rate (PLR) degrading the TCP throughput. Modern satellite systems operate at frequencies above 10 GHz, where rainfall is the dominant fading mechanism leading to high bit error ratio and correlated packet losses. In this paper, a mathematical analysis is presented to accurately describe the statistical properties of the packet-error process in a dynamically varying satellite channel. The proposed method is extended to provide PLR estimations when block forward error correction (FEC) is employed. A new Markov-based method, based on the previous analysis and adapted to the rain-faded satellite channel, is also presented for the estimation of TCP SACK throughput and tested against simulation results. Based on the information provided by the packet-error model, a study between the TCP performance under various FEC schemes and a proposed adaptive FEC scheme has provided indications about the superiority of the proposed model.