Performance Enhancement System for Long Thin Unreliable Intermittent Pipes

The Navy is seeking advanced Internet Protocol (IP) performance enhancement technologies to increase the efficiency of the current RF and Microwave data communication systems. Despite IP’s huge potential, however, it has not proved to be appropriate when satellite and RF wireless links are employed. This is because, these satellite and RF wireless links exhibit long delay times, intermittent communications, and large transmission errors, which the current IP technologies are not designed to address. Thus, the Navy is actively seeking innovative IP performance enhancement technologies for Long, Thin, Unreliable and Intermittent (LTUI) pipes such as noisy, narrow and medium bandwidth satellite communications and bandwidth constrained intermittent Line-Of-Sight (LOS) links. BCI’s innovative Generic Network Measurement Software Architecture (MSA) is capable of eliminating severe network performance limitations and underutilization associated with LTUI networks. The MSA achieves accurate network measurements by intelligently monitoring/measuring IP packets traveling through LTUI links, and applies those measurements to set TCP/IP internal parameters. Enhancement mechanisms include data and multimedia, voice and Quality of Service (QoS) applications. Its design principles and requirements focus on high TCP/IP and QoS performance, seamless operation, no requirement to change each host in a network, applicability to a wide variety of Navy platforms, effective network management and high potential for commercialization.