Protocols for the on-board processing era

This paper investigates the end-to-end system performance of a satellite network, and suggests some optimisation and modifications to the protocols. It concentrates mainly on the performance of the transport layer, which is the first end-to-end communication layer, as well as some of the other higher layer protocols (i.e. RPC, NFS). The transmission control protocol (TCP), which is the most prevalent and universal transport protocol in use today is selected as the transport layer protocol. In addition, a brief study of the user datagram protocols (UDP) is presented.