Adaptive bandwidth partitioning among TCP elephant connections over multiple rain-faded satellite channels

The assignment of a common bandwidth resource to TCP connections over a satellite channel is considered in the paper. The connections are grouped according to their source-destination pairs, corresponding to up- and down-link channels traversed, and each group may experience different fading conditions. By exploiting the tradeoff between bandwidth and channel redundancy (as determined by bit and coding rates) in the maximization of TCP goodput, an overall optimization problem is constructed, which can be solved by numerical techniques. Different relations between goodput maximization and fairness of the allocation are investigated. The allocation strategies are tested and compared in a real dynamic fading environment. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.