ESA Open Invitation to Tender: 1-10690
Open Date: 02/11/2021 15:04 CEST
Closing Date: 15/02/2022 13:00 CEST

The objective of the activity is to design and develop end-to-end transport layer congestion control mechanisms for broadband GEO and non-GEO satellite networks, and demonstrate them over a QUIC protocol reference implementation. Targeted Improvements: QUIC over satellite performance with a quality of service similar or better compared to HTTP v2 over PEP. Description:QUIC is a new transport protocol, alternative to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standard TCP, proposed by Google Llc. Following its increasing popularity, the IETF forum have started the QUIC Working Group to modify and create an open standard transport layer protocol, QUIC. In addition, HTTP/2 will be modified and will be extended with QUIC bindings into HTTP/3. Existing split-connection Performance Enhancing Proxies (PEPs) in broadband satellite networks, which are essential for satellite systems to attain acceptable end-to-end user QoE (Quality of Experience) in web browsing, cannot work with QUIC protocol. This makes it impossible for any middlebox device to split QUIC connections into satellite-optimised and terrestrial-optimised connections in tandem. IETF is in the process of finalising its first version of QUIC and starting to work on the version 2. However, end-to-end congestion control mechanisms that are optimised for satellite networks with QUIC protocol are still missing. The activity aims to design advanced split-free, end-to-end congestion control mechanisms that are optimised for broadband GEO and non-GEO satellite networks. The resulting congestion control mechanisms shall be compatible with an existing implementation of the IETF QUIC protocol. The activity will test and evaluate the performance of these solutions in emulated and real satellite networks.

Directorate: Directorate Telecom Integrated Applica
Estabilishment: ESTEC
ECOS Required: No
Classified: No
Price Range: > 500 KEURO
Authorised Contact Person: Audrey Ferreol
Initiating Service: TIA-TT
IP Measure: N/A
Prog. Reference: E/0534-01G – CC-AT 4.0.1
Tender Type: Open Competition
Open To Tenderers From: AT+BE+CA+CH+CZ+DE+DK+EL+ES+FI+FR+GB+HU+IE+IT+LU+NL+NO+PL+PT+RO+SE
Technology Keywords: 12-B-I-Advanced Ground Communication Networking Concepts