DyBRA: A Dynamic Bandwidth Reservation Algorithm to Enhance Satellite Communications

In scenarios where a number of client nodes share a gateway in order to access a high-delay link, the original TCP as well as TCP variants specifically designed to improve performance on those links fail to provide optimal performance; this is due to the indirect inference of both end-to-end congestion and local channel conditions. To mitigate the former, C²ML (Congestion Control Middleware Layer) has been proposed as a tool for centralized and collaborative management of resources that can strongly improve performance for client hosts without affecting network resilience and connection survivability. To complete the picture, this paper proposes DyBRA, an improved version of C²ML with a bandwidth management algorithm designed to dynamically allocate bandwidth among client hosts on the basis of channel conditions, leading to improved performance regardless of the TCP variant employed by clients. Through simulations performed with the ns-3 network simulator, we show how DyBRA strongly improves throughput and TCP friendliness while reducing queue usage and latency.