A burst-approach for transmission of TCP traffic over DVB-RCS2 links

DVB-RCS2 is conceived to improve satellite channel flexibility in supporting a vast gamut of applications. In particular, a Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) MAC profile is allowed for bulk transfers typical of Internet applications. As assessed for previous DVB-RCS systems, TCP performance is seriously impaired in this context mainly because of large latency, further inflated by BoD access delay. In addition, Web traffic became more and more bursty, so that the number of TCP connections results increased, while each connection manages a small amount of data. TCP Wave is a new protocol designed to transmit in burst instead of using Sliding Window concept with the objective to accelerate transmission of short transfers. This paper assesses TCP Wave performance in comparison with standard TCP mechanisms (i.e. TCP NewReno) over a realistic DVB-RCS2 implementation on the Ns-3. The main contribution herein provided is a first analysis of the actual DVB-S2/DVB-RCS2 operations on TCP-IP protocols.