Evaluation of TCP variants and bandwidth on demand over Next Generation Satellite Network

The Internet has become an important part of day to day activities. There is hardly a day without using Internet, such as reading Emails and articles as well as enjoying music and video. Thus, it is very important for the Internet to be provided to anyone anywhere. Terrestrial network has been the underlying infrastructure for the Internet. However, terrestrial network by itself cannot always satisfy all of the growing demands for the Internet, particularly in the remote areas. Thus, the deployment of the Next Generation Satellite Network (NGSN) is needed to fill in the gap and break the digital divide. This paper evaluates how the performances of TCP over NGSN with dynamic bandwidth allocation mechanism. The TCP used in this work is a real-world TCP based on both Linux and Window Vista implementations which have been integrated into a network simulator, INET. The study reveals that the TCP performances in terms of utilization and robustness, friendliness and fairness, and userpsilas perceived Quality of Service are clearly affected by the dynamic bandwidth allocation mechanism.