A DTN Emulation Platform For Space Information Network

Humans have never stopped the pace of space exploration, and China has been very active in this aera. The traditional way of space communication is not suitable for increasingly more complex space missions in the future. Space information network, which aims to integrate the ground and the space networks, has attracted more and more attention.The characteristics of space communication is different from the ground networks. Its topology changes frequently, the transmission time is long, the bit error rate is high, and so on. The existing space communication protocol has limitations to achieve an integrated space terrestrial communication network and the recently proposed delay-or disruption-tolerant network (DTN) might be one of the options. And because of the high cost and high risk of space missions, how to evaluate new space communication protocol is a problem that needs to be solved.Based on the analysis of the characteristics and requirements of the space infor-mation network, a DTN emulation platform is designed in this paper. The platform can realize the emulation of space information network. The platform is integrated, accu-rate and scalable. The ion-dtn space communication protocols and a variety of satellite link emulation methods are embedded in the emulation platform. At last, the perfor-mance of the emulation platform is verified by experiments and the characteristics of different link emulation method is compared.The platform emulates many aspects of the space information network, including the structure of the space information network, satellite communication link, communi-cation protocol, the processing performance of satellite node and so on. The emulation platform ensures the authenticity of the simulation result by using many kinds of em-ulation methods. At the same time, it is flexible to use different configuration files to realize different scenarios.