Performance Analysis of QUIC Protocol in Integrated Satellites and Terrestrial Networks

In consideration of future significant number of network satellites orbiting in various heights and trajectories, there is a new trend that network protocols designed for current satellites might give way to protocols that dominate terrestrial networks for better adaption in scale as well as integration of future Internet. QUIC, a novel and experimental transport layer protocol, implemented by Google and designed for a quicker HTTP service has proved itself in the market and QUIC outperformed TCP most in environment with a long latency and high packet loss, which is the main feature in space. However, there is a lack of research that studies QUIC's performance in space networks. This paper focuses on QUIC's performance in space-terrestrial integrated networks compared with TCP and its modification. For this purpose, we design a concise space network with both LEO and GEO satellites involved, covering different kinds of transmission scenarios. Simulation of the network is divided into several parts, decision of different satellites' orbit parameters, real-time visibility data calculated through Satellite Tool Kit(STK), communication modeling in MATLAB and finally network conditions converted. Related data were then input in a real testbed for transport performance comparison among QUIC, TCP(Cubic Reno) and TCP with ECN enabled. The semi-physical experiment demonstrates that QUIC outperforms TCP in all experiment cases through the analysis of page load time (PLT), which shows the potential that network issues in space settled with terrestrial solutions.