AeroTCP: A Splitting Transport Protocol for an IP-based Satellite Network Supporting Aeronautical Communications

The IP-based Broadband Aeronautical Satellite Network will provide numerous new applications and services for both airspace system operations and passenger communications. However, the performance of data communications protocols and applications over such systems is dramatically degraded, especially the Internet TCP/IP protocol suite. In this paper, we propose a new transport protocols for satellite network supporting Internet and data services. Based on the observation that it is difficult for an end to- end TCP solution to solve the performance problem effectively, we propose a new splitting based TCP protocol, called Aeronautical Transport Control Protocol (AeroTCP), which takes advantage of the specific properties of satellite channel. Our simulation results show that AeroTCP improves satellite channel utilization and fairness.