Improving HTTP performance in a mobile satellite-terrestrial network

In recent years, demand for broadband wireless IP networks which support mobility has increased tremendously. Satellite Internet could play a key role, provided that performance problems TCP protocol encounters on mobile satellite channels can be solved. In fact, in such a scenario TCP tends to perform poorly because of high delay-bandwidth product, high bit error rate (BER) and burst errors due to shadowing and multipath fading. With the aim of enabling mobile users to access Web service by a satellite terminal, a simulation campaign has been carried out to compare two different approaches that may improve TCP performance and, thus, HTTP and all other TCP-based application-level protocols performance in a mobile satellite-terrestrial integrated network. The former approach adopts TCP Reno and a reliable data link protocol on the satellite channel, the latter one exploits TCP Reno with the SACK option and an unreliable data link protocol on the satellite channel. The simulation results have shown that in sub-urban and rural environments recovering wireless losses at link layer can improve HTTP performance more than using an enhanced version of TCP.