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A study of mechanisms to support variable-rate Internet applications over a multi-service satellite platform

Satellite broadband has the potential to provide Internet connectivity to people and places that are unreachable using other wired/wireless technologies. It is therefore a critical component of any service seeking to provide universal coverage. A universal service needs to support a range of Internet applications. While there is existing work on bulk and interactive applications with a characteristic transmission rate, popular Internet applications such as web browsing, web video download or variable-rate voice result in a network traffic that varies its transmission rate. This thesis first investigates the interaction of satellite resource request mechanisms with the quality of service offered to these variable-rate applications using a satellite platform based on DVB-RCS2. It shows that a flexible QoS architecture can be achieved by a combination of resource request methods and network-layer queuing. Variable-rate traffic also poses challenges to the widely deployed Transport Control Protocol (TCP). Previous work analysed the interaction with the congestion control algorithms and proposed Congestion Window Validation (CWV) to constrain the congestion window to the amount of traffic a transport has sent. TCP JAGO studied this problem for variable-rate bursty applications and proposed new algorithms; but these were shown to have drawbacks and there were no guidance on how to implement. This thesis therefore presents, newCWV, a practical mechanism to provide an appropriate estimate of the available path capacity and corresponding congestion control behaviour. This benefits variable-rate applications with shorter transfer durations, but has a consequence of allowing larger traffic bursts into the network that can increase packet loss. Burst mitigation techniques, such as TCP pacing, are proposed to deal with this. These techniques are implemented and tested in the Linux TCP/IP stack, where newCWV improves the burst transfer time. This benefit is particularly significant for the large delay of broadband satellite systems.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:648905
Date January 2015
CreatorsHossain, Ziaul
PublisherUniversity of Aberdeen
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=225781

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