Joint Use of Custody Transfer and Erasure Codes in DTN Space Networks: Benefits and Shortcomings

The features that DTN protocol architecture offers are particularly appealing to handle intermittent links and disruption events, by means of the Custody Transfer option. On the other hand, the implementation of long erasure codes proved to be promising to contrast short fading events in long delay networks, where the high latency makes the use of ARQ schemes less profitable. This paper proposes a protocol design to incorporate long erasure codes into the Bundle Protocol specification. The conducted performance analysis shows the benefits coming from this integrated approach but also points out the possible shortcomings deriving from the saturation of the buffer implemented at the Bundle Protocol layer.