A simulation study of network-coding-enhanced PEP for TCP flows in GEO satellite networks

This paper focuses on geostationary satellite scenarios and investigates the performance of several Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) variants in a novel Performance Enhancing Proxy (PEP) architecture solution, whose added value is the use of network coding beneath the transport layer. Comparison of TCP New-Reno, Vegas, Scalable, CUBIC, Hybla, and HTCP and the cases where these transport protocols are used along with network coding is carried out by means of simulation campaigns. The obtained results show the potentials of the proposed network coding technique, resulting in the improvement of TCP connections performance in a wide range of channel conditions and the possible exploitation of future increase of the satellite link capacity.