Satellite and Terrestrial Network Analysis The Performance of Satellite Spoofing

In this paper, we analyze the performance of protocols in a network that consists of both satellite and terrestrial components. One method, proposed by outside research, to improve the performance of network transfers over satellite is to use a performance enhancing proxy often dubbed spoofing. Spoofing involves the transparent splitting of a network connection between the source and destination by some entity within the network path. In order to analyze the impact of spoofing, we constructed a simulation suite based around the network simulator ns-2. The simulation reflects a host with a satellite connection to the Internet or terrestrial network and allows the option to spoof connections just prior to the satellite. The methodology used in our simulation allows us to analyze spoofing over a large range of file sizes and under congested conditions, while prior work on this topic has primarily focused on bulk transfers with no congestion. As a result of these simulations, we find that the performance gain of spoofing is less beneficial for smaller sized transfers than gains obtained when transferring large files.