Abstract
In the recent year the research in the area of satellite communication has been widen to cover many areas which once considered as higher layer protocols such as TCP/IP, UDP, HTTP, FTP. The main reason is the growing demand for satellite networks to provide wider range of services with Internet service as the fastest growing satellite communication applications. A number of commercial satellite systems have been proposed from all over the world targeting multimedia services. Currently most of the applications and services are based on the existing protocol such as TCP and UDP. It is also possible that in the future B-ISDN services can directly used the ATM. However, TCP is at the moment considered as the main protocol that has to be included. Implementing TCP over satellite links has significant impact on the performance of TCP and its applications due to various reasons as satellite links have many characteristics that differ from terrestrial channels. This paper discusses the Internet protocol architecture and applications over satellite and also evaluates their performance. Simulation results from the study of TCP over satellite networks will be present. This will give a clear indication about the level of effect that satellite networks have over TCP and some applications running over TCP. Also how some of the proposed solutions can be used to enhance and make TCP a more attractive protocol for satellite networks.