Reducing Latency in Satellite Emergency Networks through a Cooperative Transmission Control

The vast majority of efforts aimed to improve network performance are focused on the increase of application throughput. The same holds in the context of Emergency Networks, where operators ask for more bandwidth in order to exploit data-intensive services. Following a steady growth in network capacities and number of users, large buffers have been inserted all over the Internet. Their effects on networks are non-trivial: while they may effectively serve the purpose of exploiting the channel potential, they also create unnecessary delays by damaging the behavior of the most common transport protocol, TCP. Nevertheless, they are being assumed by new congestion control algorithms, especially those tailored for high-latency links such as satellite ones. According to the anywhere-anytime paradigm, these channels represents a key technology for both Emergency and General-Purpose networks. In this paper we first show how buffer lengths impact the perceived delay over satellite links that employ a recently proposed burst-based TCP protocol, and then present a cooperative transmission control that reduce buffers usage and latency while keeping high throughput and flow fairness, thus allowing for a better service provision through satellite links.