A Cross-Layer Optimization between FEC and TCP over Satellite Networks

Forward error correction (FEC) scheme has dual side-effects on the throughput performance for the satellite networks. One is to consume some extra bandwidth to send redundant information, and the other is to disable the corruption-aware TCP variants to differentiate the corruption events from the loss events. This may result in significant throughput jitter while satellite channel is in an unsteady state, since the existing FEC directly discards any incompletely recovered MAC frames. This paper introduces an effective cross-layer optimization between FEC and TCP to make up the drawbacks of the existing scheme. Simulation result shows that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the throughput jitter of the unstable satellite network with a variable bit error rate and could be a better choice, compared to the existing approaches.