Deploying Internet Protocol Security in satellite networks using Transmission Control Protocol Performance Enhancing Proxies

Satellites have played an important role in global telecommunications. However, transmission control protocol (TCP) suffers performance degradations over satellite links due to the long propagation delay and high bit‐error rate. Among methods proposed to alleviate the impact of satellite link characteristics on TCP performance, split TCP connections separated by performance enhancement proxies (PEPs) have been proven attractive because they can keep TCP configurations in the end systems unchanged. While many protocols applied over satellite links between PEPs can effectively mitigate the effect of high loss rates, the long latency still limits the effectiveness of congestion control in these protocols. To minimize the effect of congestion we propose to take advantage of active queue management at the medium access control layer to provide immediate cross‐layer feedback to the TCP segment over satellite. This approach also achieves proper differentiation between packet losses due to channel errors and congestion. Simulation results show that our novel mechanism can give substantial improvements in TCP performance over satellite networks, compared to the best performing version of TCP with or without PEPs. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Long distance high bandwidth networks are spanning several continents and many remote Healthcare centers are centralizing their data centers for economic reasons. For the best performance of their data centers, TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) performance and data security are the main critical issues in these network scenarios. TCP performance is directly related to its congestion control mechanism which is responsible for detecting and reacting to the overload traffic on the network. Data security is related to the security mechanism being used by sender and receiver nodes during communication. Linux users, which have rapidly increased in the last five years and most of the Healthcare data centers are being deployed on the Linux operating system, focus the researchers to work on Linux to enhance its performance and security accordingly. The Linux operating system uses TCP CUBIC as a congestion control mechanism with TCP during communication. TCP CUBIC became the default congestion control mechanism of Linux in 2006 after kernel 2.6.18. TCP CUBIC is fundamentally a loss based TCP congestion control mechanism and at each packet loss detection, it reduces its Congestion Window ( $cwnd$ c w n d ) size 20 percent instead of 50 percent as in trademark congestion control mechanism Standard TCP. The aim of this paper is to design a new security mechanism that will work with TCP CUBIC to achieve the maximum possible performance and security over the network link. In this paper, Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) is used to compare the performance of TCP CUBIC with state-of-the-art mechanisms in long and short Round Trip Time (RTT), high bandwidth network scenarios. Results show that when new security mechanism is used with TCP CUBIC, overall better performance in the form of protocol fairness, TCP friendliness, goodput, and convergence time is achieved over the network link.

We propose a packet-level model to investigate the impact of channel error on the transmission control protocol (TCP) performance over IEEE-802.11-based multihop wireless networks. A Markov renewal approach is used to analyze the behavior of TCP Reno and TCP Impatient NewReno. Compared to previous work, our main contributions are listed as follows: 1) modeling multiple lossy links, 2) investigating the interactions among TCP, Internet Protocol (IP), and media access control (MAC) protocol layers, specifically the impact of 802.11 MAC protocol and dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol on TCP throughput performance, 3) considering the spatial reuse property of the wireless channel, the model takes into account the different proportions between the interference range and transmission range, and 4) adopting more accurate and realistic analysis to the fast recovery process and showing the dependency of throughput and the risk of experiencing successive fast retransmits and timeouts on the packet error probability. The analytical results are validated against simulation results by using GloMoSim. The results show that the impact of the channel error is reduced significantly due to the packet retransmissions on a per-hop basis and a small bandwidth delay product of ad hoc networks. The TCP throughput always deteriorates less than ~ 10 percent, with a packet error rate ranging from 0 to 0.1. Our model also provides a theoretical basis for designing an optimum long retry limit for IEEE 802.11 in ad hoc networks.

Due to the development and evolution in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs), the performance of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) over CRN has become a crucial factor. TCP ensures the reliable end-to-end delivery of data, which is very important for the quality of service (QoS) requirements. TCP performance is severely affected by channel switching and channel availability in CRNs. The frequent occurrence of such events is due to CRNs nature which unnecessarily reduces the transmission rate which results in degrading the overall performance. In this paper, the authors investigate the limitations of using TCP NewReno (i.e., standard TCP) over CRNs, and further propose a cross-layer-design protocol based on an interaction between transport layer and lower layers to improve TCP performance over CRNs. The design is called Cross-Layer Design for TCP (TCP-CLD). It primarily aims at improving the TCP performance over CRNs via controlling and adapting a few selected TCP parameters. Specifically, the authors propose freezing the data transmission and re-transmission timeout (RTO) of TCP during the time of channel switching and channel unavailability. In addition, the authors update the size of congestion window (cwnd) of TCP based on the bandwidth and buffer size of relay nodes. Moreover, in the case of channel switching, the authors update the Round Trip Time (RTT) of TCP based on the new route delay. Simulation experiments have been conducted using ns-2 network simulator tool whereas results show that the proposed design achieves a significant performance improvement compared with the standard TCP NewReno protocol and the other known protocol, namely, TCP-CRAHN.

Recent years internet blended multi-hop wireless networking technology experience growth in diverse sectors ranging from health care to the defense industry. An immense internet data traffic quantity depends on the transmission control protocol (TCP) due to its reliable data carrying ability between end process. TCP's congestion control algorithm performance under multi-hop wireless networks (MWN) is heavily influenced by retransmission timer (RT timer). The retransmission timeout (RTO) algorithm governs RT timer's clock duration. In MWN environment, Jacobson RTO prediction fails to endure sudden traffic delay spike that occurs due to inadequate recovery time during a link failure. In this paper, an analysis carried out to study the RTO's negative impact on TCP's performance under the multi-hop wireless scenario.

This paper presents a TCP/IP-based architecture (IPSecOPEP) to resolve the interoperability issue between PEPs (Performance Enhancing Proxies) and IPSec (Internet Protocol Security). Where this problem is due to the cryptographic protection of TCP header by IPSec ESP protocol, which prohibits TCP enhancing mechanisms to be performed by PEPs. The key idea of this solution is that IPSec devices can perform well as a bridge between end users and PEPs in such situations, because they can access to both TCP headers of original packets and IPSec headers of encrypted packets. By this way, IPSec devices can perform a simple mapping between original TCP headers and their corresponding IPSec headers to resolve the interoperability issue. In our proposed IPSecOPEP architecture, we add a new components to the standard TCP/IP stack for IPSec devices and PEPs proxies, to ensure cooperatively and transparently the interoperability between them, without affecting the security privacy and performance level in such situations. In fact, this solution doesn't need to exchange any secret information about IPSec-related security associations. Furthermore it doesn't imply the use of any additional headers to IPSec packets by the PEPs. However, IPSec devices should coordinate between end users and PEPs to ensure spoofing mechanism, to avoid slow start problem of a standard TCP. After that, PEPs can continue to apply other enhancing mechanisms over the satellite link. Hence, this solution presents a double advantages concerning both the security and the performance at once. Moreover, the components of this solution can be easily standardized, implemented, integrated and enabled, in IPSec and PEPs devices.

This paper analyzes performance of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in multi-hop cellular networks. Multi-hop transmission shortens communication distance and can make channel quality at each hop better. However it needs channel resources at every hop for packet transmission, and thus effective throughput on end-to-end links can be decreased. Related researches have shown that multi-hop transmission may reduce TCP performance in the systems. However, it may be because improvement of channel quality derived by multi-hop transmission has not been considered fairly. We analyze TCP performance with considering channel quality improvement on a multi-hop system. By simulation, we derived the throughput gain by multi-hop transmission for various values of the number of hops. We also have analyzed the gain according to position of active users in a cell. From the results, we show that multi-hop transmission can improve TCP performance, especially for the users near the cell edge. We also show a proper number of hops that gives maximum TCP performance.

In this paper, we study the performance of the transmission control protocol (TCP) over mobile ad‐hoc networks. We present a comprehensive set of simulation results and identify the key factors that impact TCP's performance over ad‐hoc networks. We use a variety of parameters including link failure detection latency, route computation latency, packet level route unavailability index, and flow level route unavailability index to capture the impact of mobility. We relate the impact of mobility on the different parameters to TCP's performance by studying the throughput, loss‐rate and retransmission timeout values at the TCP layer. We conclude from our results that existing approaches to improve TCP performance over mobile ad‐hoc networks have identified and hence focused only on a subset of the affecting factors. In the process, we identify a comprehensive set of factors influencing TCP performance. Finally, using the insights gained through the performance evaluations, we propose a framework calledAtraconsisting of three simple and easily implementable mechanisms at the MAC and routing layers to improve TCP's performance over ad‐hoc networks. We demonstrate thatAtraimproves on the throughput performance of a default protocol stack by 50%–100%. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The transmission control protocol (TCP) is one of the most important Internet protocols. It provides reliable transport services between two end-hosts. Since TCP performance affects overall network performance, many studies have been done to model TCP performance in the steady state. However, recent researches have shown that most TCP flows are short-lived. Therefore, it is more meaningful to model TCP performance in relation to the initial stage of short-lived flows. In addition, the next-generation Internet will be an unified all-IP network that includes both wireless and wired networks integrated together. In short, modelling short-lived TCP flows in wireless networks constitutes an important axis of research. In this paper, we propose simple wireless TCP models for short-lived flows that extend the existing analytical model proposed in [IEEE Commun. Lett. 2002; 6(2):85–88]. In terms of wireless TCP, we categorized wireless TCP schemes into three types: end-to-end scheme, split connection scheme, and local retransmission scheme, which is similar to the classification proposed in [IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking 1997; 756–769]. To validate the proposed models, we performed ns-2 simulations. The average differences between the session completion time calculated using the proposed model and the simulation result for three schemes are less than 9, 16, and 7 ms, respectively. Consequently, the proposed model provides a satisfactory means of modelling the TCP performance of short-lived wireless TCP flows. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is well-known for its poor performance over wireless networks. The main reason is the unstable condition of wireless networks. Previous attempts to improve TCP performance have been centered on techniques such as queue management, congestion window adjustment, delayed acknowledgement, and etc., because lower layers are hidden in the layered Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. With cross layer techniques, more precise data can be retrieved from lower layers for network condition estimation. In this paper, we analyze and model the factors that affect the TCP throughput in the lower layers. Consequently, to solve the TCP optimization problem, we formulate TCP performance as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). An extensive set of simulation experiments has been performed on NS-2 in order to illustrate that TCP performance can be enhanced by cooperatively adjusting lower layer factors.

The transmission control protocol (TCP) was designed to provide reliable end-to-end delivery of data over unreliable networks. Most TCP implementations have been carefully optimised to operate in wired networks. Deploying standard TCP in wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can lead to poor performance of TCP. The main problem that faces TCP in ad hoc networks is its inability to distinguish between packet losses due to congestion and those due to route failures. In order to adapt TCP to MANET environment, several TCP improvements that differentiate between different types of packet losses using explicit notification messages from lower layers have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a new end-to-end technique that does not require any participation from intermediate nodes within the network. The proposed scheme relies on expanding the retransmission timeout (RTO) interval in order to reduce the number of timeouts that do not result from congestion. Simulation results show that our scheme can improve TCP throughput and delay. It outperformed the standard TCP in detailed simulation experiments.

Throughput and fairness performance of transmission control protocol (TCP) worsens critically under vehicular environment due to its weakly bounded congestion threshold parameter, rate reduction approach and congestion recovery algorithm. In this paper, a new congestion control algorithm for vehicular networks, called VC-TCP (Vehicular customized -TCP) is proposed to overcome the limitations of the existing independent congestion control approaches. The VC-TCP implements a newer congestion threshold parameter, which regulates the spurious rate reduction due to an abrupt increase in RTT spike value. During the congestion control process, VC-TCP uses a new recovery algorithm and bandwidth utilization based rate reduction, which substantially improves the flow fairness of TCP traffic flows with different bandwidth utilization levels. The throughput, flow fairness, and packet latency performances of VC-TCP is evaluated against the standard Vegas congestion control approach under simulated vehicular scenarios. The simulation outcomes verify the performance improvement of the proposed VC-TCP approach against the standard TCP variants in the different facets of the vehicular environment.

Transmission control protocol (TCP) performance over multi-hop networks is currently attracting considerable interest from the research community. The characteristics of multi-hop networks, such as mobility, link layer contention, high bit error rate, asymmetric path, network partition, hidden exposed nodes and dynamic routing, do not fit the requirements of for a good reliable data delivery. Here we want to provide an overview of the research progress in applying algorithms to the problem of multi-hop conditions and characteristics. The scope of this review will encompass core methods and protocols of over multi-hop networks, including cross-layer, network layer protocols and medium access control (MAC) layer protocols. The research contributions in each field are systematically summarized and compared, allowing us to clearly define existing research challenges, and to highlight promising new research directions. The findings of this review should provide useful insight into current multi-hop networks literature and be a good source for anyone who is interested in TCP in wireless approaches or related fields.

While Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) works well with a low bit error rate (BER), the performance of TCP degrades significantly if the BER rises above a certain level. A study of the performance of TCP with high BER is required for the efficient design and deployment of such systems. In this paper, we address the problem of TCP performance in high BERs and analyze the issues by investigating the effect of BERs on system performance. We consider TCP Reno in our study to explore the system performance using extensive analysis of simulation and modeling. In the analysis, we consider the amount of datagram sent and retransmitted, mean throughput, link-layer overhead, TCP window size, FTP download response time, packet dropping and retransmission, and the TCP congestion avoidance mechanism. We validate simulation results by setting up a virtualized testbed using Linux hosts and a Linux router. The results obtained show that TCP throughput degrades significantly and eventually collapses at the packet drop probability of 10% (BER = 10−5). The FTP download response time is about 32 times longer than that of a perfect channel (no packet dropping). We found that TCP Reno cannot handle such a high BER to operate in wireless environments effectively. Finally, we provide recommendations for network researchers and engineers confronted with the challenge of operating TCP over noisy channels.

Most of the traffic in today's Internet is controlled by the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Hence, the performance of TCP has a significant impact on the performance of the overall Internet. TCP is a complex protocol with many user-configurable parameters and a range of different implementations. In addition, research continues to produce new developments in congestion control mechanisms and TCP options, and it is useful to trace the deployment of these new mechanisms in the Internet. As a final concern, the stability and fairness of the current Internet relies on the voluntary use of congestion control mechanisms by end hosts. Therefore it is important to test TCP implementations for conformant end-to-end congestion control. Since web traffic forms the majority of the TCP traffic, TCP implementations in today's web servers are of particular interest. We have developed a tool called TCP Behavior Inference Tool (TBIT) to characterize the TCP behavior of a remote web server. In this paper, we describe TBIT, and present results about the TCP behaviors of major web servers, obtained using this tool. We also describe the use of TBIT to detect bugs and non-compliance in TCP implementations deployed in public web servers.