Loss differentiation algorithm for TCP over LEO satellite networks

Recent growth of the Internet has led the development of Internet services over low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Despite the progress on improving transmission control protocol (TCP) mechanisms, several studies have reported that conventional TCP over LEO satellite networks have significantly degraded the performance of the TCP protocol. This performance degradation is mainly due to TCP´s lack of the ability to differentiate the packet losses caused by network congestion from the losses caused by satellite link random errors. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end mechanism, called SLDA, which based on SACK to accurately differentiate between wireless and congestion losses. Simulation experiments show that the proposed scheme can effectively mitigate the negative impact of wireless link errors on the performance of TCP and provides better fairness compared to the conventional TCP.