Flow Control at Satellite Gateways

Broadcast satellite networks are going to play an important role in the global information infrastructure. Several systems including DirecWay from Hughes Network System use satellites to provide direct-to-user high speed Internet services. TCP works well in the terrestrial fiber networks but does not work well in satellite hybrid (satellite-terrestrial) networks. In this paper we analyze the problems that cause this dramatically degraded performance. Based on the observation that it is difficult for an end-to-end solution to solve these problems in this kind of hybrid networks, we propose a connection splitting based solution. A rate based protocol is designed for the satellite connections and a flow control scheme at the satellite gateways (SGW) is used to couple the two split connections together. Our simulation results shows that our scheme can maintain high utilization of the satellite link and improve fairness among the competing connections.