An application of novel communications protocol to high throughput satellites

Abstract

For network communications using modern high throughput satellite (HTS) on geostationary orbits, network throughput of transmission control protocol (TCP), one of the most popular protocols, is limited due to the packet loss on the satellite link. The packet loss is mainly caused by the attenuation of signals in severe weather conditions like heavy rain. It is high time to develop novel network communication techniques on the transport layer in TCP/IP designed for the systems and applications in broadband communications. In this paper, we introduce a high-speed data transfer protocol, named high-performance and flexible protocol (HpFP), to achieve high throughput for the HTS even with packet loss. The HpFP, in comparison with TCP-Hybla and UDP-based data transfer (UDT) protocols, is evaluated on a laboratory experiment simulating a geostationary orbit satellite link of 10 Gbps. It is clarified that the HpFP outperforms both the TCP-Hybla and the UDT showing high throughputs (close to 10 Gbps) when the packet loss ratio (PLR) is 1%, and remains more than 1 Gbps under even 10% PLR condition. Moreover, in case of no packet loss, the HpFP exhibits a quick start-up time (6 sec) at the initial phase to achieve 10 Gbps, while the TCP-Hybla and the UDT take 9 sec and 16 sec to their maximum throughputs, respectively.