Enhancing TCP splitting in satellite-terrestrial networks via ACK reservation

In this paper, we focus on the performance of TCP splitting in satellite-terrestrial hybrid networks. By simulation we show that long-time link outage has great negative impact on TCP throughput. To solve the problem, an ACK reservation scheme is proposed to speed up TCP recovery from link outage and analytical estimate of a key parameter of the scheme is provided for achieving high end-to-end TCP throughput. Simulation results validate our analysis, and show that after the end of link failure, the TCP source can be re-started using ACK reservation with virtually no additional lag leading to great improvement on bandwidth utilization and end-to-end throughput.