Re: BER and TCP/IP performance

From: Eric Travis ([email protected])
Date: Wed Mar 31 1999 - 09:53:23 EST


On Wed, 31 Mar 1999, William D Ivancic wrote:

<snip>

> The following report has a graph showing TCP vs SPCS in an errored
> environment. Remember. This is for a single stream. SCPS performs very
> well here, but was optimized for a specific environment that does not
> correspond to that of a commercial satellite.

Huh?!?

OK - I really have to ask... what *specifically* does not
"correspond to that of a commercial satellite"?

Do you mean "commercial communications satellite"? Even there,
I'm not sure what specific environment you mean by such a
generalization.

Can you please clarify?

If you mean that communications satellites have no errors
(or there are no economic impacts to scrubbing a satellite
link to 10E-10+), why do these questions keep coming up? :o)

Can you also be more specific about what optimizations SCPS-TP
(I assume you *are* referring to the transport protocol, not the
network, security protocols) makes that make it inappropriate
for use on a "commercial satellite" sunbnetwork? Where (and why)
is it not applicable?

Finally, not every satellite is a communications satellite - this
is a point I tried (unsuccessfully) to make during the life of the
TCPSAT working group.

For the original poster, there is no simple answer[1];

  Are the errors uniform or bursty?

  What is your segment (and frame) size?

  What does your traffic look like?

Eric

[1] I lied - The simple (and unsatisfying) answer is to have as
clean a link as your link-budget can provide without busting your
engineering/operational budget. TCP's interpretation of loss
as a signal for congestion demands operation over as clean a link
as possible. Fred's answer of 10E-8 is usually a good rule of thumb,
but you still only use a fraction of the satellite bandwidth for which
you are paying.

TCP works over really crappy links - data will be reliably delivered,
it just that the performance will suffer.



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