PLMS: A Packet Loss Memory-based Transmission Enhancement Scheme for GEO Satellite Networks

Geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellites are vital components of $6G$ communication networks. However, GEO satellite networks face two main challenges. On the one hand, the long round-trip time makes the retransmission mechanism in the traditional transmission protocol slow to respond, which restricts the transmission performance. On the other hand, congestion packet loss caused by multi-stream competition and link packet loss due to high bit error rate coexist in GEO satellite networks, which makes it difficult for traditional congestion control (CC) algorithms to distinguish and make appropriate control decisions. To tackle these challenges, we propose a packet loss memory-based transmission enhancement scheme (PLMS). PLMS first modifies the TCP retransmission mechanism to accelerate the retransmission speed and enable the retransmission of packets that are lost again. Furthermore, PLMS introduces the packet loss memory mechanism to discern transmission link conditions, distinguish packet loss types, and dynamically adjust the sender's behavior. The mechanism can prevent misjudging bit error packet loss as congestion packet loss, thus improving CC accuracy. Our experimental results demonstrate that PLMS significantly boosts the throughput of existing CC algorithms. Specifically, under conditions of the 1 % packet loss rate caused by bit errors, the throughput of CUBIC, BBR, and Hybla increase by 945%, 9.5%, and 154%, respectively.