Experimental Investigation of Rate-Based and Delay-Tolerant Transmission Mechanisms over GEO-Satellite Communication Links

Some work has been done in evaluating the performance of CFDP and the rate-based SCPS-pure rate control over space communication channels. In this paper, we present an experimental performance comparison between SCPS-pure rate control and the CFDP in the deferred mode over a simulated geostationary earth orbit (GEO) communication link. We intend to see which protocol is more effective in coping with a long GEO-satellite link delay, especially when hybridized with a high bit-error-rate (BER), and which one has throughput performance advantage over another. Based on the analysis of the experimental results, we found that the rate-based SCPS-pure rate control outperforms CFDP and standard TCP with a much higher throughput, and the throughput advantage becomes more pronounced when the channel rates are asymmetric. Quantitatively, SCPS-pure rate control has a performance advantage around 6600 bytes/sec over symmetric channel and around 8500 bytes/sec over asymmetric channel in comparison to CFDP-TCP and Linux-TCP.