Achieving Relative Service Differentiation for TCP Traffic in Satellite IP Networks Using Congestion Pricing

This paper proposes the use of congestion pricing for achieving relative service differentiation in satellite IP networks. The idea is to use congestion pricing as an effective approach to control traffic rate for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) flows, with Explicit Congestion Notification as a congestion feedback mechanism, by taking into account network users’ willingness-to-pay. With multitude of competing TCP flows, congestion pricing ensures that the higher the user’s willingness-to-pay, the higher the traffic throughput. We implement the congestion pricing approach on the ns-2 simulator and evaluate its performance on both geostationary and non-geostationary satellite IP networks. Simulation results show that congestion pricing can be adopted as an effective approach for service differentiation in satellite IP networks and achieves fair relative service differentiation.