Efficient packet transmission over long-fat lossy links:research and development

Designing efficient packet transmission over lossy links with a large bandwidth-delay product (i.e., long-fat) is important in the next-generation wireless networks, which are envisioned to be of a space-air-ground integrated scale. Transmission control protocol (TCP), the dominant transport layer protocol in the past decades, is known to have had performance issues in such links. A new transport approach was proposed using user datagram protocol (UDP) along with an application-layer forward erasure correction (FEC) code called streaming code to provide retransmission-free reliability. A novel approach based on reinforcement learning (RL) was proposed to jointly perform congestion control and FEC repair transmissions. Proof-of-concept simulations demonstrate that the approach can achieve high and smooth goodput in long-fat lossy links, which can be attractive for performance-enhancing proxy (PEP). It also highlights several future research directions that can be exploited based on the proposed approach.