SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will research an advanced form of transparent network TCP proxies for both satellite and terrestrial broadband wireless communications to the Internet. Low cost shared wireless access links to the Internet often exhibit what we have called a traffic/cost anomaly. While almost 90% of the traffic in the network can flow from the Internet to the user, almost 90% of the cost of the access links can be attributed to the channel transmitting packets from the user to the Internet. Much of this cost can be directly attributed to the performance penalties imposed upon wireless access channels by the structure of conventional TCP protocols. The proxy to be developed will be designed to deal with these performance penalties with the objective of providing an improvement of 10x in the effective throughput of the multiple access channels. The broader impacts of the use of such proxies would be to make practical a cost effective broadband Internet access option for millions of users without such an option at this time.

This Small Business Innovation Research Program Phase II project will develop advanced forms of transparent network proxies for both satellite and terrestrial broadband wireless communications to the Internet. Shared wireless access links to the Internet often exhibit what has been called a traffic / cost anomaly. While almost 90% of the traffic in the network can flow from the Internet to the user, almost 90% of the cost of the access links can be attributed to the channel transmitting packets from the user to the Internet. Wireless Internet access from the user to the Internet is often implemented by means of some variation of a random access ALOHA channel. The interaction of ALOHA channels with TCP and other high level protocols used in the Internet can limit the effectiveness of both TCP and ALOHA for such access. The goal of this NSF SBIR research program is to understand this awkward interaction of standards in the high cost random access channel and to develop a strategy of migration to a more sensible access architecture based upon transparent proxies.