Experimental Performance Comparison of Rate-based and Store-and-Forward Transmission Mechanisms over Error-Prone Cislunar Communication Links

Some work has been done in evaluating the performance of the rate-based SCPS-pure rate control and the store-and-forward CFDP protocol. In this paper, we present an experimental performance comparison between SCPS-pure rate control and the CFDP in the deferred mode over a simulated error-pone, long-delayed, point-to-point cislunar communication link. The focus of this work is to see which protocol is more effective in coping with a long cislunar-link delay, especially when hybridized with a high bit-error-rate (BER), and which one has throughput performance advantage over another. The comparison results show that SCPS-pure rate control has a better performance than CFDP-TCP and Linux-TCP over both symmetric and asymmetric cislunar communication channels with all BERs, and its throughput advantage is higher than 3000 bytes/s over both symmetric and asymmetric channels at all levels of BER The advantage is more significant over asymmetric cislunar channel with a high BER around 10^-5. The rate-based SCPS-pure rate control is more effective in coping with a long cislunar link delay, especially when hybridized with a high BER. CFDP-TCP and Linux-TCP do not have significant performance difference in any cases.