This study analyzes and proposes a solution to address TCP performance degradations associated with satellite links. The proposed middleware (proxy-based) solution provides a flexible means for implementing a transport protocol across the satellite network that is tailored to the satellite¡¯s bandwidth/delay and channel impairment conditions without requiring changes within end client/server devices. The net-centric solution also overcomes the limitations of standard TCP enhancement proxies that are rendered ineffective when network layer security is applied or when diverse routing paths are introduced. The proposed study focuses on the design of a satellite communications network infrastructure that incorporates network and performance proxies that are transparent to the SATCOM infrastructure as well as to end-user devices and network. The proxy-based solution: - provides dynamic traffic management in addition to standard TCP performance enhancement,- supports robust, customer-definable, network layer security, ensuring consistent end-to-end network layer security,- supports flexible network addressing that decouples end-user IP addresses from their location in the network,- introduces multi-homing to allow diverse, redundant routing paths across the satellite network, and- provides multiple routing paths as a means of bandwidth/path management to further enhance the performance of TCP traffic.
Benefits: The proposed development extends standard TCP performance enhancement while ensuring robust, customer-definable network-layer security and allowing TCP operation across diverse, redundant satellite paths. The net-centric design will therefore allow the benefits of TCP performance enhancement to be applied to new, legacy or mixed military or commercial SATCOM terminal environments that require high network reliability and redundancy and robust network security.
Keywords: TCP performance enhancement, net-centric, secure addressing, redundant routing
