Experimental Evaluation of TCP-STAR for Satellite Internet over WINDS

Satellite link speeds are now increasing in unison with those of terrestrial links. For example, the maximum link speed of WINDS (Wideband Internetworking engineering test and Demonstration Satellite) which was launched on 2008 is 1.2 Gbit/s. WINDS is expected to support applications in education, medicine including telemedicine, and disaster countermeasures. Therefore, such satellite communication service is one of the key technologies for network assurance. TCP-STAR was proposed to improve the throughput over satellite Internet. However, no experimental evaluation of TCP-STAR over satellite links such as WINDS has been published. Therefore, this paper evaluates the performance of TCP-STAR by comparing with TCP-New Reno and TCP-Hybla over a network consisting of WINDS, HDR-VSAT, and portable VSAT. As a result, it is found that TCP-STAR and TCP-Hybla achieve better throughput when segment losses do not occur, while TCP-STAR achieves the best throughput when segment losses occur.