On elastic traffic via contention resolution diversity slotted aloha satellite access

This paper presents a performance study relative to the coupling of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) with the Contention Resolution Diversity slotted aloha (CRDSA) protocol, in the case of greedy TCP connections (also called elephants) on Digital Video Broadcasting-Return Channel via a geostationary satellite. CRDSA, which takes advantage of interference cancellation algorithms for collision/contention resolution, has already exhibited interesting performance when the power levels of all received bursts are perfectly balanced. In this paper, we extend the study to a more realistic case, where a certain spreading of the bursts' power levels is taken into account. The consequent capture effect even facilitates the collision resolution mechanism and yields an improvement in the overall TCP performance with respect to the balanced case. Furthermore, in certain conditions, the adoption of packet level forward error correction allows achieving even higher peaks of throughput than the expected ones. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.