Comparison of Adaptive Transport Layer Error-Control Mechanisms for Highly-Dynamic Airborne Telemetry Networks

Transport protocols in highly-dynamic airborne networks call for adaptive error-control mechanisms to provide efficient error detection and recovery. Due to the highly dynamic nature of these networks and short contact durations between the nodes, the AeroTP protocol uses an adaptive multi-mode mechanism to provide a varying degree of reliable services to the application data. The two fundamental error-control mechanisms include an end-to-end ARQ mechanism to provide complete reliability in the AeroTP reliable mode and an end-to-end FEC mechanism to provide statistical reliability in the AeroTP quasi-reliable mode. In this paper, we present our implementation of the hybrid-ARQ mechanism in ns-3 to improve the throughput and delay performance of the AeroTP protocol. We also compare and analyze the performance of hybrid-ARQ against the different AeroTP modes, TCP, and UDP protocols.