Performance evaluation of TCP-AFC in an emulated real network

Success of emerging satellite-based services depends on the performance of communication protocols like TCP, which degrades in wireless environments. TCP with delayed fast recovery and adaptive flow control (TCP-AFC) has been evaluated through simulation experiments showing significant performance enhancement in wireless environments in general and satellite networks in particular. TCP-AFC enhances TCP performance by identifying random loss with the help of selective acknowledgments. However, simulations are often not as informative as tests conducted with real TCP implementations over real networks. The objective of this paper is to validate effectiveness of TCP-AFC in wireless environments including a satellite network having appreciable channel noise and delay in an emulated environment - a real network. In extensive experiments conducted on the test bed, we also examine the ability of TCP-AFC in obtaining a fair share of bandwidth while competing with UDP- based real time traffic. Additionally, live Internet measurements reconfirm the compatibility of TCP-AFC in existing terrestrial Internet.