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On the impact of link layer retransmission schemes on TCP over 4G satellite links
Author(s) -
Kuhn N.,
Lochin E.,
Lacan J.,
Boreli R.,
Clarac L.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
international journal of satellite communications and networking
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.388
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1542-0981
pISSN - 1542-0973
DOI - 10.1002/sat.1064
Subject(s) - computer science , computer network , link layer , data link layer , hybrid automatic repeat request , retransmission , transport layer , transmission control protocol , automatic repeat request , tcp acceleration , selective repeat arq , tcp global synchronization , tcp tuning , throughput , physical layer , layer (electronics) , network packet , wireless , telecommunications link , telecommunications , chemistry , organic chemistry
SUMMARY We study the impact of reliability mechanisms introduced at the link layer on the performance of transport protocols in the context of 4G satellite links. Specifically, we design a software module that performs realistic analysis of the network performance, by utilizing real physical layer traces of a 4G satellite service. Based on these traces, our software module produces equivalent link layer traces, as a function of the chosen link layer reliability mechanism. We further utilize the link layer traces within the ns ‐2 network simulator to evaluate the impact of link layer schemes on the performance of selected Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) variants. We consider erasure coding, selective‐repeat automatic request (ARQ) and hybrid‐ARQ link layer mechanisms, and TCP Cubic, Compound, Hybla, New Reno and Westwood. We show that, for all target TCP variants, when the throughput of the transport protocol is close to the channel capacity, using the ARQ mechanism is most beneficial for TCP performance improvement. In conditions where the physical channel error rate is high, hybrid‐ARQ results in the best performance for all TCP variants considered, with up to 22% improvements compared to other schemes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.