A Simulation Study of Enhanced TCP/IP Gateways for Broadband Internet over satellite

The demand for Internet bandwidth has been growing rapidly over the years and the use of high bandwidth satellites has been proposed as one possible solution to meet the increasing demand. However, there are certain performance problems with providing Internet over satellite due to the nature of TCP/IP protocol suite and the satellite link characteristics. In this paper we describe a simulation study of architecture for improving the performance of TCP/IP over satellite links. On each end of satellite link, there are gateways that split the TCP  connection so that the satellite link is transparent to the end hosts. The split TCP connection over the satellite segment is then optimized. TCP connection control is maintained on each segment of the split connection. We simulated such an architecture in OPNET and present results showing improved throughput over the satellite link.