Performance of Interplanetary Overlay Network (ION) protocols in cislunar communications

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been trying different ways to advance cislunar communications. Its main purpose is to accomplish space communication using internet protocol, such as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP) is a new protocol in which communication in space is carried out. Interplanetary Overlay Network (ION) is an implementation of Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) and is designed to reduce cost and risk in space communication by simplifying its design and working over space links, terrestrial links, and planetary links. ION implements the TCPCL, LTPCL, and UDPCL to work with high channel Bit Error Rate (BER) and long link delays. In this thesis, we exhibit the performance evaluation of ION protocols including (1) BP/TCPCL/TCP/IP; (2) BP/LTPCL/UDP/IP, and (3) BP/UDPCL/UDP/IP over the cislunar channel. Based on experimental evaluation and statistical analysis, we conclude that LTP has a statistically significant performance advantage over TCP and UDP with change in delay. Performance of TCP decreases with an increase in link delay. Also, there is no effect of change in link delay and BER on goodput of UDP. We hope that the experimental results in this thesis will be verified in realistic experiments in a space environment.