Study of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) performance over Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN)

In an increasingly interconnected world, the demand for high-speed, low-latency internet access is constantly growing. Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) have emerged as a promising solution to provide global connectivity to remote and underdeveloped areas, as well as to complement existing terrestrial...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Velasco García, Víctor
Tipo de recurso: tesis de maestría
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/422983
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/422983
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:TCP/IP (Computer network protocol)
Wireless communication systems
TCP
NTN
5G
6G
HARQ
TCP/IP (Protocol de xarxes d'ordinadors)
Comunicació sense fil, Sistemes de
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Enginyeria de la telecomunicació::Telemàtica i xarxes d'ordinadors
Descripción
Sumario:In an increasingly interconnected world, the demand for high-speed, low-latency internet access is constantly growing. Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) have emerged as a promising solution to provide global connectivity to remote and underdeveloped areas, as well as to complement existing terrestrial coverage. However, these networks present unique challenges, such as long propagation delays and dynamically changing capacity, that can negatively impact the performance of traditional network protocols, such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). This work studies the performance of TCP in an NTN environment for a given configuration. To do so, a simulator was developed from scratch to model TCP communication in an NTN scenario and compare its performance with a Terrestrial Network (TN) case. Results show that TCP throughput is lower in NTNs than in TNs due to the inherent challenges of these networks. It is also demonstrated that the number of Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) processes can limit TCP throughput in an NTN scenario. Finally, the study shows that the propagation of HARQ feedback errors to TCP negatively impacts the throughput.