A Performance Analysis of TCP and STP Implementations and Proposals for New QoS Classes for TCP/IP
David J. Holl · Digital WPI · 2003
With a new United States Army initiative to exploit commercially developed information technology, there is a heightened interest in using Internet protocols over the military’s geosynchronous satellite links. TCP is the dominant Internet protocol used for reliable data exchange, but its own design limits performance when used over long delay network links such as satellites. Initially this research set out to compare TCP with another proposed protocol, the Satellite Transport Protocol (STP). However through a series of tests, we found that STP does not fulfill its claims of increased throughput over TCP and uncovered a flaw in STP’s founding research. In addition, this thesis proposes and demonstrates novel performance enhancing techniques that significantly improve transport protocol throughput. iii Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank my advisor, Prof. David Cyganski, for sharing his insights in physics, electrical engineering, and the art behind successful presentations. Next, I would like to thank my thesis committee, Prof. Brian King and Prof. William Michalson, for their time and helpful suggestions, and I would like to thank Raytheon’s Network Centric Systems Division for sponsoring the research project which provided ample thesis material