  The Saratoga transfer protocol was developed by Surrey Satellite Technology
Ltd (SSTL) for its Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) satellites. In over
seven years of operation, Saratoga has provided efficient delivery of
remote-sensing Earth observation imagery, across private wireless links, from
these seven low-orbit satellites to ground stations, using the Internet
Protocol (IP). Saratoga is designed to cope with high bandwidth-delay products,
constrained acknowledgement channels, and high loss while streaming or
delivering extremely large files. An implementation of this protocol has now
been developed at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial
Research Organisation (CSIRO) for wider use and testing. This is intended to
prototype delivery of data across dedicated astronomy radio telescope networks
on the ground, where networked sensors in Very Long Baseline Interferometer
(VLBI) instruments generate large amounts of data for processing and can send
that data across private IP- and Ethernet-based links at very high rates. We
describe this new Saratoga implementation, its features and focus on high
throughput and link utilization, and lessons learned in developing this
protocol for sensor-network applications.
