Abstract
Satellite-based Internet links often feature link bandwidths significantly below those of the ground networks on either side. This represents a considerable bottleneck for traffic between those networks. Excess traffic banks up at IP queues at the satellite gateways, which can prevent conventional TCP connections from reaching a transmission rate equilibrium. This well-known effect, known as queue oscillation can leave the satellite link severely underutilised, with a corresponding impact on the goodput of TCP connections across the link. Key to queue oscillation are sustained packet losses from queue overflow at the satellite gateway that the TCP senders cannot detect quickly due to the long satellite latency. Network-coded TCP (TCP/NC) can hide packet loss from TCP senders in such cases, allowing them to reach equilibrium. This paper reports on three scenarios in the Pacific with two geostationary and one medium earth orbit connection. We show by simulation and circumstantial evidence that queue oscillation is common, and demonstrate that tunneling TCP over network coding allows higher link utilisation.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Information Society Innovation Fund Asia through the Pacific Island Chapter of the Internet Society (PICISOC) and by Internet New Zealand. We would also like to thank the many Internet users and staff of Telecom Cook Islands, Internet Niue, and the Tuvalu Telecommunication Corporation for their patience during this study and for sharing their precious bandwidth with us. We would also like to thank Nevil Brownlee for letting us use his flow traces, which assisted us in modelling our flow size distribution.
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© 2015 Institute for Computer Sciences, Social informatics and Telecommunication Engineering
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Speidel, U., Qian, L., Cocker, ’., Vingelmann, P., Heide, J., Médard, M. (2015). Can Network Coding Mitigate TCP-induced Queue Oscillation on Narrowband Satellite Links?. In: Pillai, P., Hu, Y., Otung, I., Giambene, G. (eds) Wireless and Satellite Systems. WiSATS 2015. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 154. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25479-1_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25479-1_23
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