On the Delay Advantages of a Network Coded Transport Layer in IoT Nanosatellite Constellations

Abstract

Given the increasing demand of small satellite-based services for the Internet of Things (IoT), we study the potential benefits of employing Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) as a transport layer scheme in nanosatellite constellations for IoT. We present a timing analysis of the end-to-end transmission process for the Reliable Datagram Protocol (RDP) and RLNC at the transport layer to compare their performances. It includes the effect of these protocols in terms of delay for different IoT scenarios such as event detection/localization, asset tracking and sensor data aggregation. We verify with numerical simulations, that for our schemes ideal bit rates that minimize the total delay are possible. We observe 50–65% delay reductions for RLNC under the same operational conditions as RDP.