When BBR beats FEC coded CUBIC flows over SATCOM

Matthieu Petrou (1) , David Pradas (1) , Nicolas Kuhn (2) , Mickaël Royer (3) , Emmanuel Lochin (3)

1 Viveris Technologies
2 CNES - Centre National d'Études Spatiales [Toulouse]
3 ENAC - Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile

This paper assesses the benefits of using Sliding Windows Forward error codes (SWF) to protect transport protocol sessions over a SATCOM link within IP tunnels. We consider two commonly deployed protocols and congestion control algorithms : TCP/CUBIC, currently deployed by default inside most of recent OS kernels and a QUIC/BBR implementation named Picoquic. Our objective is to evaluate the performance of these protocols in challenging SATCOM environments and to assess if SWF can contribute to improve their performance. We consider two different scenarios based on real loss mobility patterns played over the OpenSAND satellite emulator. Results show that using SWF tunnels can hide losses to a CUBIC server: this reduces the download time of 20MB by more than 90%. However, the main finding is that SWF does not contribute to the download time reduction for BBR, making useless its deployment. We conclude that the use of BBR over SATCOM could be an efficient way to perform communications over unreliable links, resulting from a high mobility context for instance, considering BBR flows are managed by an adequate QoS allocation.

Mots clés: TCP; QUIC; SATCOM; Sliding Window FEC; CUBIC; BBR

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Matthieu Petrou, David Pradas, Nicolas Kuhn, Mickaël Royer, Emmanuel Lochin. When BBR beats FEC coded CUBIC flows over SATCOM. The 11th Advanced Satellite Multimedia Systems Conference, Sep 2022, Graz, Austria. ⟨10.1109/ASMS/SPSC55670.2022.9914784⟩. ⟨hal-03590651⟩