Improving goodput on shared satellite links with coded tunnels
Ulrich Speidel · 2021 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) · 2021
The Internet's main transport protocol, TCP, struggles to make full use of the capacity of geostationary (GEO) and medium-earth orbit (MEO) satellite links due to their long latency and bottleneck bandwidth, in particular if these are shared by many parallel TCP connections. Large TCP transfers may back off to effective rates orders of magnitude below the link's available bandwidth. Conventional mitigation measures either violate the Internet's end-to-end principle or contribute to bufferbloat. A hardware-based simulation of coded tunnels in this paper shows that there is another way: Using the erasure-correcting properties of random linear network codes, one can increase both goodput of large transfers and overall link utilisation in both GEO and MEO settings without extra buffer or end-to-end principle violations.