New research project: QUICSAT – New protocols for faster Internet via satellite
In the QUICSAT project, the cooperation between the Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg and ND SatCom GmbH has the common goal of improving Internet protocols and applications for geostationary satellite connections.
The potential of new technologies (AQM, ECN, BBR and especially QUIC) will be examined. The ultimate goal is that Internet via satellite should perform as good as terrestrial Internet connections.
The high latency of geostationary satellites, the current architecture of Internet protocols and the constantly increasing complexity of Internet applications (especially websites) are the reason why the performance of Internet via satellite is sometimes worse than the performance of terrestrial Internet connections, even if the data rates are comparable. Newer Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms are currently not used in satellite communication. With QUIC there is also the risk that the performance of satellite Internet will decrease due to the non-applicability of Performance Enhancing Proxies.
The project makes a contribution to protocol research, standardization and reference implementations.