TCP-ADaLR: TCP with adaptive delay and loss response for broadband GEO satellite networks

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) performance degrades in broadband geostationary satellite networks due to long propagation delays and high bit error rates. In this thesis, we propose TCP with algorithm modifications for adaptive delay and loss response (TCP-ADaLR) to improve TCP performance. TCP-ADaLR incorporates delayed acknowledgement mechanism recommended for Internet hosts. We evaluate and compare the performance of TCP-ADaLR, TCP SACK, and TCP NewReno, with and without delayed acknowledgements. In the ideal channel case, TCP-ADaLR exhibits the lowest user-perceived latency for FTP and HTTP applications. In the presence of congestion, TCP-ADaLR shows comparable performance to TCP SACK and TCP NewReno. In the presence of error losses, TCP-ADaLR exhibits improvements up to 61% and 76% in throughput and utilization, respectively. In the presence of both congestion and error losses, TCP-ADaLR exhibits goodput and throughput improvements up to 43%. TCP-ADaLR exhibits better fairness and friendliness than TCP NewReno and maintains TCP end-to-end semantics.