Interplanetary Overlay Network (ION) for Long-Delay Communications with Asymmetric Channel Rates

Abstract

Interplanetary Overlay Network (ION) is an implementation of delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) developed as infrastructure for space communications in interplanetary flight mission systems. To date, no work has been done in evaluating the effectiveness of ION when it is applied to an interplanetary Internet involving very long link delay and highly asymmetric channel rates. In this paper, we present an experimental evaluation of ION over a typical three-node interplanetary infrastructure in the presence of a long link delay, highly asymmetric channel rates and varying data loss rate. One major conclusion is that the hybrid of TCP and Licklider transmission protocol (LTP) convergence layer protocols has significant goodput advantage over other protocol options as the ratio of data channel rate to ACK channel rate increases.