XCP in a geostationary satellite context

Abstract

This paper tackles the use of the XCP transport protocol in a satellite context. XCP aims mainly at avoiding congestion. However, in GEO satellite access network, XCP is also expected to offer fairness between data flows, a better bandwidth use and a quite stationary throughput per flow. Then, the two main points of this work are to propose a satellite network architecture based on XCP and to study the behaviour of XCP compared to a classical TCP in this context (through NS2). Nevertheless, all of our expectations are not encountered: XCP shows several limits, highly induced by the high delay of GEO systems and low bandwidth. Eventually, the paper discusses the use of XCP as a resource manager for IP networking satellite systems.