SATELLITES AND THE INTERNET
Challenges and Solutions
By DC Palter - 1st Edition


This book is written for the satellite professional who wants to learn about the design of the Internet and the TCP/IP protocols. In particular, this book focuses on the background needed understand and overcome the performance limitations of TCP/IP when running over satellite in order to be able to design a satellite-based IP network which can take best advantage of expensive satellite bandwidth.

With the growth of the Internet, computer networking for e-mail and Web communications by consumers, businesses, and governments has quickly become a larger consumer of bandwidth than telephony. Even voice traffic is migrating to run over IP. This has created an important new market for communications satellites especially in providing links to the many locations across the globe where terrestrial options have difficulty reaching.

The growth of the Internet has also made TCP/IP the de facto standard for all computer networking, making it critical for satellite operators and users to understand the fundamentals of TCP/IP. Unfortunately, the TCP protocol is not well designed for long delay, high bit error, and asymmetric bandwidth conditions typical of satellite networks. Consequently, it is necessary for the satellite network architect to understand the cause of these limitations and how to design around them in order to create an efficient, responsive network that does not suffer from the performance constraints and can compete with terrestrial alternatives.


This book is not designed to be a comprehensive text on TCP/IP for protocol experts. It is, however, intended to be a comprehensive guide to networking for the satellite professional, including sufficient detail, written as non-technically as possible, to understand the inner workings of the protocols, and thereby grasp the causes of the performance limitations and how to overcome them.

Consequently, the text is divided into three sections. The book begins with a primer on the fundamentals of computer networking. Next, it discusses the various component protocols of the TCP/IP suite. The text then focuses on the design of TCP, the protocol used for reliable transmission of data, looking at the design of the protocol itself and how that design interacts with satellite link conditions to limit performance over the network.


The text then begins a comprehensive review of the various solutions to overcome these limitations. It starts with modifications to TCP/IP itself to improve its performance, then describes various alternative techniques, including specialized satellite protocols, protocol gateways, spoofing, compression, forward error correction, and multicast that can be employed to overcome TCP limitations and create a high performance satellite network.

Approximately 250 pages / 5.5" x 8.5" / Over 100 tables, charts, index, glossary / ISBN: 0-936361-36-0
Price:  US$45.00  

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