[e2e] TCP in outer space

[Michael Welzl]

> > In other words, don't blame TCP. 
> 
> There are plenty of other things to blame TCP for, mostly involving
> conflation of congestion and errors...

Right; and there's one thing I never understood:
Why isn't TCP translated into a rate-based scheme and vice versa across
a satellite (or other wireless) link?

Like this:

  O ----------- O XXXXXXXXX O --------- O
Sender         GS1         GS2       Receiver

GS1, GS2 = Ground Stations 1 and 2
XXXXXX = noisy link

Sender, Receiver: regular TCP
GS1: perform buffering, behave like TCP receiver, perform
flow control (NO congestion control) with GS2
GS2: act like TCP sender, tell GS1 how fast to send via explicit
rate signaling (based on acks from Receiver)
GS1: send acks based on min( congestion window, rate from GS2)

Of course, it's not going to be easy - but there should be
some way to bridge the noisy link, right? Or am I being naive?

Cheers,
Michael