Protocol Support for a New Satellite-Based Airspace Communication Network

Abstract

We recommend suitable transport protocols for an aeronautical network supporting Internet and data services via satellite. We study the characteristics of an aeronautical satellite hybrid network and focus on the problems that cause dramatically degraded performance of the Transport Protocol. We discuss various extensions to standard TCP that alleviate some of these performance problems. Through simulation, we identify those TCP implementations that can be expected to perform well. 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 acknowledgement (ACK) for fast recovery. Our simulation results show that AeroTCP can maintain higher utilization for the satellite link than end-to-end TCP, especially in high BER environment.