Effects on TCP of routing strategies in satellite constellations

What is it about?

A broadband satellite network uses a constellation of a number of similar satellites to provide wireless networking services to the Earth. A number of these constellation networks are under development. This article introduces the types of satellite constellation networks, and examines how overall performance of TCP communications carried across such a network can be affected by the choice of routing strategies used within the network. Constellations utilizing direct intersatellite links are capable of using multiple paths between satellites simultaneously as a strategy to spread network load. This allows more general routing strategies than shortest-path routing, but we show these strategies to be detrimental to the performance of individual TCP connections.

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Why is it important?

Print errata: Figure 3(b)i reverses the colours of the seamed and seamless Teledesic delay traces, although the hop traces are correct. Figure 5(b)i has the legends for 50ms and 500ms reversed, as is clear from their positions. This paper and Ch. 3 of my PhD thesis are not aware that real IP networking devices do load balancing by hashing on source and destination addresses, so that TCP flows are not reordered by round-robin multipath forwarding.

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