Stochastic delay evaluation for DTN based space networks

The increasing demand on space communication stimulates the research on space internetworking. Delay/Disruption tolerant network (DTN) is a promising architecture for space networks. It is critical to provide a guaranteed delay for time-sensitive applications. Most existing studies on stochastic delay of DTN are based on experiments. The rest aim at general network scenarios and their result are unmatched to space networks. This paper analyzes the stochastic delay of DTN based space networks. In specific, the authors use the first-order and second-order statistics to characterize the transmission. The delay is firstly decomposed into disruption delay and queuing delay. Then, theoretical results are derived for queuing delay. A cumulative analysis and a steady state analysis have been carried out for queuing delay evaluation in different situation. Numerical simulations validated our theoretical analysis.