Abstract
Satellite-based Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (S-UMTS) is used to provide all kinds of Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) based Internet services for global end users. However, due to the high propagation delay and high bit error rates over satellite links, the TCP performance degrades considerably and affects many qualities of TCP based services. In this work, we focus on studying the TCP performance in S-UMTS using radio link control (RLC) with fragmentation and retransmission mechanisms. Analytical and simulation studies have been carried out to study this cross-layer problem. Two scenarios have been studied, i.e., the satellite operates in either transparent mode or with onboard processor (OBP) mode. The results indicate that the TCP performance can be enhanced substantially by employing the relay function using OBP and appropriate configurations of RLC parameters, thus providing useful information to the design the next generation communication satellite with onboard processing.