| Reliable transport protocols such as the TCP transport layer protocol have been designed and tuned for traditional wired networks. TCP performs relatively well on such wired networks by adapting to end-to-end delay and to losses caused by congestion. However, in the case of wireless links, such as satellite channels, due to the special attributes of satellite links, such as high bit error rates, large propagation delays etc., TCP performance degrades significantly. The work described in this thesis was motivated by the need for improving the performance of TCP over satellite channels. In this thesis three connection-splitting architectures based on the use of transparent proxies are implemented and tested. Namely, a single-TCP-interproxy-connection connection-splitting architecture, a multiple-TCP-interproxy-connection connection-splitting architecture and a UDP-interproxy-connection connection-splitting architecture are implemented. The throughput increases obtained by the latter two architectures were very significant with the UDP connection-splitting scheme even yielding a throughput improvement of an order of magnitude in some cases. |
