This paper proposes an adaptive reliable transport protocol based on damping feedback mechanism in satellite networks (SATP) which uses filtering techniques to improve the stability and reliability of available bandwidth estimation and contains a new adaptive congestion avoidance algorithm. It adjusts the transmission strategy adapting to the different bandwidth-delay product and the change of network conditions by the use of damping thresholds to deal with the problem that the utilization of conventional reliable transport protocols declined significantly in satellite communications due to the high bandwidth-delay product, delay jitter and satellite relative motion. The performance of SATP is evaluated through a satellite simulation platform of integrated hardware and software components. Simulations demonstrate that SATP can achieve up to 46 percent higher throughput than classic satellite transmission protocol in different satellite networks topologies and share the link resource fairly.
