Abstract:
For many Pacific Islands, satellite links are currently the only viable option for Internet connectivity. These links invariably represent bottlenecks with long latency - something that TCP's flow control algorithms are well known to struggle with. We look at TCP behaviour on such links and argue that they don't work as well as simple tests may indicate. We also discuss possible solutions to the problem, and demonstrate that one of them - network coding - is able to accelerate TCP connections significantly if deployed across the bottleneck.
