Congestion control using multilevel explicit congestion notification in satellite networks

Exponential growth of Internet traffic and the proliferation of new user applications warrant the development of new Internet infrastructure. Due to the fundamental satellite system characteristics such as global coverage, broadcast nature, and bandwidth on demand, satellite systems are excellent candidates for providing high data rate Internet access and global connectivity accommodating multimedia applications. However, to meet this goal, provisioning of quality-of-service (QoS) within the advanced satellite network systems is the critical requirement. Congestion remains the main obstacle to Quality of Service (QoS) on the Internet. In today’s TCP networks, ECN is the only explicit mechanism, which delivers congestion signals to the source. In this paper we present a new traffic management scheme based on an enhanced Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) mechanism. In particular we used multilevel ECN, which conveys more accurate feedback information about the network congestion status than the current ECN scheme. We have designed a TCP source reaction that takes advantage of the extra feedback information and tunes better its response to the congestion than the current schemes. Our analysis and simulations results show that our scheme performed better than the current ECN, having less losses, better network utilization, less delays, and the solution is scalable.