Buffer Management Policy for Mars Intelligent Proximity Network

Future Mars missions will require effective surface communications network supporting exploration activities and scientific field data collection. In order to meet the need for future Mars exploration missions, NASA has come up with various proximity networks. These proximity network are relatively small, fairly short-range, often ad hoc, wireless network typically dedicated to tasks such as transporting in site sensing data. This paper enlist the challenges in these proximity networks in general. We describe proximity network architecture with repeaters to increase the communication range of the Mars exploration rovers. We also describe the Mars reply protocol which make the network autonomous than remotely operated from Earth. In order to achieve data delivery in such challenging networking environments, researchers have proposed the use of store-carry-and-forward protocols. However, the buffer size in proximity network nodes (Mars rover for example) are unavoidably limited. Thus, efficient buffer management policies are necessary to decide which messages should be discarded, when node buffers are operated close to their capacity. In this paper, we have proposed buffer management policy for image data traffic. Using simulation we have shown that our buffer management policy provided optimal delivery ratio in all scenario when compared with other policies.