Delay Resistant Transport Protocol for Deep Space Communication

The throughput of conventional transport protocols suffers significant degradation with the increased Round Trip Time (RTT) typically seen in deep space communication. This paper proposes a Delay Resistant Transport Protocol (DR-TCP) for point-to-point communication in deep space exploration missions. The issues related to deep space communication protocol design and the areas where modifications are necessary are investigated, and a protocol is designed that can provide good throughput to the applications using a deep space link. The proposed protocol uses a cross layer based approach to find the allocated bandwidth and avoids initial bandwidth estimation. A novel timeout algorithm estimates the timeout duration with an objective to maximize throughput and avoid spurious timeout events. The protocol is evaluated through extensive simulations in ns2 considering high RTT values typically seen in Lunar and Mars Exploration Networks under different conditions of packet error rates. DR-TCP provides a significant increase in the throughput as compared to traditional transport protocols under the same conditions. A novel adaptive redundant retransmission algorithm is also presented to take care of the high PER in deep space links. The effect of the Retransmission Frequency has been critically analyzed considering both Lunar and Deep Space scenarios under different levels of PER. The results are very encouraging even in high error conditions. The protocol exhibits a RTT independent behavior in throughput, which is the most desirable quality of a protocol for deep space communication.