Satellite communication system is an ideal medium to provide Internet connectivity to wide area coverage. Most of the Internet applications and services run over TCP/IP protocol to deliver data to destinations. New satellite system architectures like Digital video broadcasting-return channel via satellite (DVB-RCS) are being designed to be fully IP based. However, geosynchronous orbit (GEO) satellite channels are characterized by long round-trip time (RTT), large bandwidth delay product (BDP) and high bit error rates (BER) that cause to degrade standard TCP performance in satellite links.
In this thesis, we propose a cross-layer design scheme in TCP splitting connections on DVB-RCS networks. A cross-layer architecture allows for interaction between TCP and the resource allocation (RA) scheme in the link layer. TCP congestion window (CWND) is tuned using information on the RA in layer 2. To evaluate the performance, we implement the tuned CWND on TCP Linux kernel over TCP-splitting based performance enhancing proxy (PEP) test-bed. The results show that TCP CWND can be adjusted by RA information in the proposed cross-layer design. In all the results, especially in higher link error rate, the performance of the customized TCP is very impressive in both single and multiple sessions.
