MobiWeb: an approach for mobile Web access over satellite links

Maritime organizations (such as the US Coast Guard, the US Navy, and the merchant navy) have identified the potential of maritime Web and messaging applications implemented over commercial satellite links to substantially increase the effectiveness of their operations. However, there are two major impediments to the widespread deployment of this technology for such applications, i.e., high operational costs and non-optimal performance of the TCP/IP protocol over satellite links. This paper presents the design of software, called MobiWeb, to address the problem of mobile Web access over satellite links. A key component of MobiWeb is a tunable TCP/IP stack that implements satellite link specific optimizations to the standard TCP/IP stack to deliver significant improvements in Web access latency. The paper presents results of simulations that indicate the potential of the tunable TCP/IP stack to deliver performance improvements of up to 65% in terms of Web access latency over traditional TCP/IP stacks.