FIG. 1 illustrates how a preferred embodiment of the present invention splits a TCP connection 26 into three segments. A source node 10 originates the TCP connection by transmitting a TCP SYN packet to the destination node 18. The TCP packet travels over the source segment 20 to a source gateway 12 which intercepts the packet and converts it to a second, non-TCP protocol. The packet is then transmitted across the wireless link 22 in this second protocol, and is received by a destination gateway 16.

"The destination gateway converts the packet back to TCP and forwards the packet to the destination node 18 over the destination segment 24. Once the connection is established, packets travel back and forth from source to destination or from destination to source, and are translated by the gateways 12,16 for transmission over the wireless link 22. Note that either or both of the source or destination segments 20,24 may comprise a network. For illustration purposes FIG. 1 shows a network 11 in the source segment 20."

"In practice, either node 10, 18 may be both a source and a destination at various times. In addition, "client" is used interchangeably with "source", and "destination" interchangeably with "server", but again, a node may be both a client and server. Generally, then, we refer to the requester of information as the source or client node, and the responding node as the destination or server node. For simplicity of discussion, we always choose one node as the source or client, and the other node as the destination or server."

"Typically, the source segment 20 and destination segment 24 use terrestrial connections and operate using unmodified TCP/IP protocols. However, the gateway to wireless link 22 uses a special wireless link protocol (WLP) which compensates for the physical characteristics of the satellite path 14. Software at each gateway 12, 16 converts packets from TCP to WLP as they enter the wireless gateway-to-gateway connection 22, and converts them back to TCP as they exit the connection 22. . . "

From U.S. Patent 6,415,329, Method and apparatus for improving efficiency of TCP/IP protocol over high delay-bandwidth network