Performance Evaluation of the AeroTP Protocol in Comparison to TCP NewReno, TCP Westwood, and SCPS-TP

Abstract

Due to the unique characteristics of highly dynamic airborne telemetry environments, TCP when deployed in such networks suffers significant performance degradation. Given the limitations of TCP, the AeroTP opportunistic transport protocol with multiple reliability modes has been developed to specifically address the issues posed by telemetry networks. In our previous work, the different modes of AeroTP have been simulated and tested using the open source ns-3 network simulator. In this paper, we use ns-3 to evaluate the overall performance of AeroTP by comparing it with well-studied TCP variants: the widely-deployed TCP NewReno and TCP Westwood designed for wireless environments. Since space networks share many similar characteristics with telemetry environments, we also compare AeroTP with SCPS-TP.