Experimental Evaluation of Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) Protocols for Long-Delay Cislunar Communications

TCP experiences severe performance degradation in cislunar communications because of some assumptions built into its design. Delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) is a class of network techniques that is developed to work over Internet protocols to accommodate long link delay and frequent link disruptions in space communication environment. Most of the work concerning DTN protocols and techniques focused on its application in terrestrial wireless network and sensor-based networks. In this paper, we present an experimental evaluation of the DTN protocols with BP/TCPCL running on top of TCP/IP over a long-delay cislunar communication channel with and without link disruption. We hope the experiment results and analysis in this paper will apply equally well in any deep space mission with a round-trip time (RTT) that is comparable to that of the Earth-Moon system.