Performance of Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP) in LEO-Satellite Communications with Link Disruptions

Near Earth missions ranging from low-Earth orbit (LEO) to Earth-Sun Lagrangian points will continue to be a majority of future space missions. A few works have been done with delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) technology for LEO-satellite communications and provided feasibility for its adoption in LEO space missions. However, no much work has been done to fully evaluate the performance of DTN in such an environment, especially in the presence of long link disruption, data corruption and loss, and link asymmetry. In this paper, we present an experimental performance evaluation of DTN architecture and protocol stack, with Licklider transmission protocol (LTP) serving as a convergence layer adapter (CLA) underneath bundle protocol (BP), in a typical LEO-satellite communication infrastructure accompanied by a very long link outage, various packet corruption and loss rates, and channel rate symmetry and asymmetry. The experiment was conducted by performing realistic file transfers over a PC-based test-bed.