Transmission Performance of Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP) and Bundle Protocol (BP) in DTN Architecture

Abstract

From Near-Earth orbit (NEO) to Earth-Sun Lagrangian points will continue to be a majority of future space exploration quests. A few works have been done with long distance delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) technology for Near-Earth orbit (NEO) transmission and provided feasibility for its adoption in NEO and long distance exploration quests. [1] However, no much work has been done to fully evaluate the performance of DTN architecture in such an environment, especially in the presence of long link disruption, data corruption and loss, and link asymmetry. [2] In this research, we present an experimental performance evaluation of DTN architecture and protocol stack, with Licklider transmission protocol (LTP) serving as a convergence layer adapter (CLA) underneath bundle protocol (BP), in typical NEO and long distance transmission infrastructures accompanied by a very long link outage, various packet corruption and loss rates, and channel rate symmetry and asymmetry. [3] In addition, we present an experimental investigation of the performance of DTN custody transfer with long link break. The experiment was conducted by performing realistic file transfers over a virtual server test-bed.