PEP-Policer: Eliminating the On-Off Traffic Pattern in PEP Over Satellite Networks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Performance Enhancement Proxies (PEPs) are widely used to improve TCP performance in geostationary orbit (GEO) satellite networks, which experience long RTT (approximately 500 ms). As a split TCP-based solution, PEP divides the end-to-end connection into multiple sub-connections, each independently managing its own rate control, including both congestion and flow control. This independence naturally leads to rate imbalances, manifested as an abnormal on-off traffic pattern-a phenomenon confirmed by our experimental observations in real-world GEO satellite networks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this on-off traffic pattern not only undermines fairness but also reduces throughput, particularly for small-sized flows. To address this problem, we propose PEP-Policer, an automatic rate limiter for PEP to limit the link with higher rate to the lower one. Unlike traditional rate limiting methods that require manual configuration of the target rate, PEP-Policer employs a finite state machine to automatically determine and enforce the appropriate target rate. Moreover, as an add-on, PEP-Policer is compatible with all PEP-based solutions and can be integrated without modifying existing systems. Extensive evaluations in an emulated GEO satellite network show that PEP-Policer improves TCP's fairness and increases goodput by up to 63.0% for Cubic, 49.6% for BBR, and 88.6% for Hybla.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".