An Analytical Framework for Disruption of Licklider Transmission Protocol in Mars Communications

As one of the main data transport protocols of delay/disruption-tolerant networking (DTN), Licklider transmission protocol (LTP) is designed to provide reliable data delivery in an interplanetary Internet environment characterized by frequent and lengthy link disruptions and extremely long signal propagation delays. Some studies have been done on the performance of LTP in cislunar and Mars communications. However, to date the effect of link disruption on LTP for Mars communications has received little attention. In this paper, an analytical framework is presented for the effect of link disruption on reliable data delivery and performance of LTP in Mars communications. The analysis focuses on how various link disruptions affect the number of transmission attempts, the consequent round-trip time (RTT) of data exchange, and the resulting goodput performance of LTP for reliable data block delivery in Mars communications. The analytical framework is validated by means of realistic data block transmission experiments using a PC-based experimental infrastructure, and it can be used to predict the performance of LTP over a deep-space vehicle communication channel in presence of link disruption.