Study of a New Transport Protocol for Satellite Links

Characteristics of satellite links, such as long propagation delay (MEO and GEO satellites) and high bit error rate (BER) degrade TCP performance. In this work, we describe and analyze a new transport protocol called STP (Satellite Transport Protocol) proposed by ESA (Europeam Space Agency) to be applied in satellite channels. Through OPNET Modeler 10.5A, we simulated a transfer data between two ground stations using a GEO satellite link. We simulated different values of BER in the channel and measured the throughput obtained by TCP and STP. In all cases, STP reached better performance than TCP.