Final Report: The Center for Space Telemetering and Telecommunications

The performance of the Multicast Dissemination Protocol (MDP) in a simulated satellite channel is investigated. The environment that is modeled is that to be expected in a small satellite communications environment including channel errors and link interruptions. The satellite link is simulated with a channel environment simulator. The performance of MDP is compared with file transfer protocol (ftp) acting as a standard basis. In these experiments, we find that MDP does not perform as well as ftp in the high quality channel, although the performance difference is small. MDP does perform better than f tp in low-quality channels. MDP is also able to resume data transmissions when a link outage occurs. MDP is seen as being a viable option for use in small satellite communications systems.