Title: A performance enhanced transmission control protocol for inter-planetary networks

Authors: Sangita Dhara; Raja Datta; Kalyankumar Bandyopadhyay

Addresses: Department of E&ECE, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India ' Department of E&ECE, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India ' Department of E&ECE, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India

Abstract: Activities in deep space have prompted researchers to develop new protocols for inter-planetary network. In this paper, we propose a performance enhanced inter-planetary transmission control protocol (IP-TCP) for deep space communication. IP-TCP opens multiple parallel TCP connections to transfer a number of TCP segments simultaneously over a single physical link. We have developed theoretical models to understand the performance of IP-TCP with regard to long RTT, asymmetric bandwidth and high bit error rate comparable to deep space environment. Through simulations we evaluate the proposed protocol considering RTT values typically seen in Mars exploration networks under different conditions of packet error rates. We observe that the IP-TCP outperforms few popular existing protocols which are also extensions of terrestrial TCP.

Keywords: inter-planetary networks; IPN; transmission control protocol; TCP connections; round trip time; RTT; packet error rate; PER; deep space communication; transport layer; deep space communication; theoretical modelling; asymmetric bandwidth; bit error rate; BER; simulation; Mars exploration networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSPACESE.2015.073213

International Journal of Space Science and Engineering, 2015 Vol.3 No.3, pp.219 - 245

Received: 22 Jun 2015
Accepted: 19 Aug 2015
Published online: 27 Nov 2015 *

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