TCP Splitting Protocol for Broadband Aeronautical Satellite Networks

In this paper, we recommend suitable transport protocols for an aeronautical network supporting Internet and data services via satellite. For the future IP-based aeronautical satellite hybrid network, we describe TCP protocol and focus on the problems that cause dramatically degraded performance of the Transport Protocol. Based on the observation that it is difficult for an end-to-end solution to solve these problems effectively, we propose a new TCP-splitting protocol, termed Aeronautical Transport Control Protocol (AeroTCP). The main idea of this protocol is to use a fixed window for flow control and one duplicated acknowledgment (ACK) for fast recovery. We also study the Gilbert-Elliott channel model for satellite channel since protocol behavior often depends strongly on the channel behavior. Our simulation results show that AeroTCP can maintain higher utilization for the satellite link than end-to-end TCP, especially in burst error-environment.