Analysis of Licklider Transmission Protocol for Reliable File Delivery in Space Vehicle Communications With Random Link Interruptions

Abstract

Delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) was proposed as a networking architecture for reliable data delivery in space vehicle communications despite long propagation delays and/or lengthy link disruptions. As one of the main data transport protocols of DTN, Licklider transmission protocol (LTP) was proposed by the NASA for reliable data delivery in challenging space environments in which the existing transport protocols of DTN, TCP, and UDP do not perform effectively. Pair-wise comparisons among LTP, TCP, and UDP running in the DTN stack have previously been done using statistical methods; evaluation results and performance analysis are available in the existing LTP research literature. However, there is as yet no solid analytical model of LTP performance in the presence of link disruptions. In this paper, we present an analytical method to predict transmission performance of LTP for reliable file delivery in space vehicle communications with focus on the expected file delivery delay (or latency) over space channels characterized by random link disruptions. Realistic file-transmission experiments using a PC-based infrastructure are presented to validate the analytical models. The analysis and study results presented in this paper are expected to be useful in understanding the impact of transmission conditions and configurations, on the efficiency of LTP when deployed for reliable data delivery in space missions using communication links that are subject to frequent and random interruptions.