Performance Evaluation of TCP in Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Relay Networks

Abstract

In the land mobile satellite (LMS) communication, a hybrid satellite-terrestrial relay networks (HSTRNs) using a maximal ratio combining (MRC) scheme are widely used to enhance the quality of signal from a satellite. In this paper, we derive equations for the TCP throughput and the spectral efficiency in the HSTRN and analyze results of the performance evaluation for TCP in various environments. In the simulation results, it is shown that increasing the number of terrestrial relays can enhance the TCP throughput and spectral efficiency thanks to the MRC scheme. However, the usage of the static number of terrestrial relays considering no channel states would cause the overhead. Furthermore, it has a limitation to enhance the network performance by only MRC scheme in HSTRN because the TCP performance is sensitive to the packet los rate. Therefore, we discuss the possible solutions that can additionally enhance the network performance and reduce the overhead.