SM_TCP: a new reliable multicast transport protocol for satellite IP networks

Abstract

A new reliable multicast transport protocol SM_TCP is proposed for satellite IP networks in this paper. In SM_TCP, the XOR scheme with the aid of on-board buffering and processing is used for error recovery and an optimal retransmission algorithm is designed, which can reduce the recovery time by half of the RTT and minimize the number of retransmissions. In order to avoid the unnecessary decrease of congestion window in the high BER satellite channels, the occupied buffer sizes at bottlenecks are measured in adjusting the congestion window, instead of depending on the packet loss information. The average session rate of TCP sessions and of multicast sessions passing through the satellite are also measured and compared in adjusting the congestion window, which contributes to bandwidth fairness. Analysis and simulation results show fairness with TCP flows and scalability.