Improving web experience on DVB-RCS2 links

The specifications of digital video broadcasting—return channel via satellite (DVB-RCS2) state that the satellite gateway could introduce both random and dedicated access methods to distribute the capacity among the different home users. Before starting an engineering process to design an algorithm allowing to combine both methods, it seems necessary to assess the performance of each. This paper compares random and dedicated access methods by measuring their impact on the performance of transmission control protocol (TCP) sessions when the home users exploit the DVB-RCS2 link for regular use (e.g., web browsing or email transmission). In this paper, we detail the implementation of an NS-2 module emulating physical channel access (PCA). This module fills a gap in terms of random and deterministic access methods and allows to model various satellite channel access strategies. Based on NS-2 simulations using realistic system parameters of the DVB-RCS2 link, we demonstrate that, compared to dedicated access methods, which generally result in higher levels of transmitted data, random access methods enable faster transmission for short flows. We propose to combine random and dedicated access methods, with the selection of a specific method dependent on the dynamic load of the network and the sequence number of the TCP segments.