Experimental and simulation performance results of TCP/IP over high-speed ATM over ACTS

To assist in the design and understanding of future global networks, this paper describes the practical and simulation experiences gained from a TCP/IP on ATM network over a high speed satellite link and presents performance comparison studies of such networks with the same host/traffic configurations over local area (LAN) and wide area (WAN) networks. It was found that the satellite systems deliver performance similar to the terrestrial networks regardless of their path latencies in cases where the communication channels exhibit a low bit error rate (BER). NASA's Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS), with its special characteristics and high data rate satellite channels, and the ACTS ATM Internetwork (AAI) were used in these experiments to deliver broadband traffic. Network performance tests were carried out using application-level software (ttcp, Netspec) on OC-3 and OC-12 ATM satellite links.