Performance Characterization of Rohc for Satellite-based Unidirectional Links Using Error-free Channels

Satellite communication systems play a vital role in providing Wide Area Network (WAN) due broader coverage but at the same time impose challenge for IP services in unidirectional Satellite link. This research evaluates RObust Header Compression (ROHC) for Unidirectional Lightweight Encapsulation (ULE) in terms of network performance and practical implementation design of a ROHC via Satellite test-bed. Moreover, mathematical model was presented to estimate the theoretical performance characteristics of ROHC compressed traffic which is then compared with empirical results. The experiments showed that ROHC delivered significant improvement in bandwidth utilization for packets with small payload sizes with up to 86% gain in throughput performance when compressing traffic. Packets with larger payload sizes exhibited an exponential decrease of throughput gain achievable through ROHC as the size of the payload increased. This paper also discusses the effectiveness of ROHC for IPv4 versus IPv6 traffic that was evaluated indicates IPv6 traffic streams benefited to a greater degree from ROHC than did IPv4 traffic streams, even on non-ideal links.