Application of recent reliable transport layer advancements to DoD SATCOM network challenges

Reliable transport layer protocols deliver user data between network endpoints while providing reliable delivery and congestion control functions. Department of Defense (DoD) satellite communication (SATCOM) networks exhibit complex challenges such as long latency, high link asymmetry and loss, unlike wired networks. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a ubiquitous reliable transport layer protocol, originally designed for the traditional internet, that does not perform well with these network challenges. This work investigates whether modern reliable transport layer protocols and congestion control algorithms perform better than traditional TCP protocols. TCP Cubic, TCP Hybla, QUIC Cubic and QUIC Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR) were evaluated with a simple dumbbell scenario under a large variety of link conditions (long latency, high link asymmetry and loss). We showed that QUIC BBR can be configured to work well with all these conditions and achieve 4 times higher throughout when long latency, high link asymmetry and loss are applied together in a single test case.(2)