Mr. Bucca,
MITRE has developed a set of extensions to TCP (called SCPS, see below and
http://www.scps.org ) that can greatly enhance performance in stressed
environments exhibiting one or more of the following characteristics:
Highly asymmetric bandwidth allocation
Large delays
Link outages
A high degree of corruption-related loss
We have a reference implementation of the SCPS stack and a transparent
gateway application that will translate between TCP with and without the
SCPS performance-enhancing options. This means that you can run SCPS over
the satellite link while preserving compatibility (and congestion control!)
on the ground portions of your network. All of this is available as source
code, free of charge, to most US companies. I'm not entirely sure, but as
I understand it, if you then use the code to make a product, you're free to
sell it with no interference from us (and no royalties, etc.). Check this
last with the appropriate lawyers.
The rest of this message is extracted from our IANA request for the various
TCP option numbers.
This research began as part of the Space Communications Protocol
Specification (SCPS) work, however we believe that the options developed
have wider, more general-purpose applicability.
The four TCP options for which we are requesting assignment of option
numbers are:
* SCPS-capabilities option. This option allows endpoints to
agree/decline to use the following TCP extensions: Partial Reliability
Transport Service (PARTS, a set of extensions for TCP), Selective Negative
Acknowledgments (SNACK), loss-tolerant header compression, and
network-layer timestamps.
* Selective Negative Acknowledgments (SNACK) option. This option is
set on ACK segments to indicate the presence and location(s) of holes in
the receiver's out-of-sequence queue.
* Record boundaries option. This option is set on data packets
containing bytes that have been logically marked as being record boundaries.
* Corruption experienced option. This option can exist on both data
and ACK packets to indicate that a link in a path is experiencing corruption.
The attached pdf file contains a description of the options. If you have
any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me:
Keith Scott
mailto://[email protected]
(703) 883-6547
--keith
At 09:25 AM 01/19/2000 -0700, sbucca wrote:
>Dear all,
> Our company is looking for software which transparently resides
> on top of
>the TCP/IP stack to enhance its performance over satellite links.
>Information on commercially available software and companies who would be
>receptive to writing custom software would be greatly appreciated. Thank
>you.
>
>
>Steve Bucca
>Codespace, Inc.
>[email protected]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 14 2000 - 16:14:59 EST