TCP Performance in Satellite Backhauling for Maritime Communications: A ns-3 Study

In maritime communications, using satellites as the backhaul is an important scenario. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the most dominant transport-layer protocol and directly affects user experience. Due to the inherent high propagation delay and random packet loss characteristics of satellite link, it may cause TCP performance be seriously affected using a satellite backhaul. To analyze the TCP performance in satellite backhauling, this paper combines the Long Term Evolution (LTE) model in ns-3 with a geostationary communication satellite model (sns3) to build a practical satellite-based backhauling system. The paper compares the throughput and latency performance of several state-of-the-art TCP variants, namely Cubic, Hybla, Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT (BBR), Copa and PCC. It is found that the TCP variants exhibit different advantages/disadvantages in different testing scenarios, suggesting that no one is a clear winner in the satellite-backhauling systems. The results also show that the satellite terminal buffer has a great influence on the performance of some TCP variants in the backhauling transmission.