Performance of TCP Vegas, Bic and Reno Congestion Control Algorithms on Iridium Satellite Constellations

Satellite networking is different from wired or wireless networks. The behavior and the performance of TCP/IP in normal wireless network as well as in wired network are different from one another. The TCP/IP protocol was not designed to perform well over high-latency or noisy channels so its performance over satellite networks are totally different. Each satellite networks/constellations have different properties. The deployment height, motion, direction, link capacity – all differ from one satellite constellations to another. So, certainly the behavior of TCP/IP will considerably differ from one satellite constellations than another. The Performance of three different TCP Congestion algorithms, Vegas, Reno and Bic are taken for evaluation on the simulated satellite network Iridium and the performance of the three algorithms under the satellites constellation is measured using suitable metrics. It is observed that, irrespective of the high end to end delay, the behavior of TCP/IP under Satellite network is somewhat resembling a high latency wired network. TCP under satellite network is not like that of a mobile ADHOC network. The observation resulted that the overall performance of Vegas was good in Iridium constellations. These reasons should be explored for designing a better congestion control algorithm exclusively for Satellite Networks. Index Terms — Iridium, TCP Vegas, TCP Bic, TCP Reno, Performance Metrics