Unreliable CCSDS File Delivery Protocol (CFDP) over point-to-point cislunar links

There is an imperative need to automate the network world into a deep space environment to satisfy the growing human interest towards the interplanetary world and meet the increasing demands of human needs in communication fields. However there is still a major predicament to decide an optimal communication protocol that can operate adeptly in the complex deep-space scenarios characterized by high bit error rate, long propagation delay, constrained bandwidth, asymmetry, and episodic connectivity. TCP/IP has been widely-used transport protocol to date in today's Internet but fails to maintain its ascendancy in space environment because of significant differences between the terrestrial and space environments. CCSDS File Delivery Protocol (CFDP) is a new standard protocol developed under "The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS)" to operate efficiently in the deep space mission prevailing the challenges commence by free-space intrinsic characteristics.The main motivation of our thesis work is to provide an experimental performance evaluation of CFDP configured over different underlying protocol suites. There are many theoretical and experimental studies performed regarding the efficacy of CFDP operation in low earth orbit (LEO) and geo-stationary orbit (GEO). Nevertheless, CFDP performance over cislunar channel has not been evaluated previously. This thesis work covers the experimental investigation of CFDP operation in the simulated cislunar domain with all the prominent features. The concepts explicated in this thesis should work equally well in any deep space mission with round-trip time that is roughly equivalent to the Earth-Moon system and in LEO or GEO orbital vicinity. It is also anticipated that the potentialities (relevant to CFDP operation) developed for cislunar space will also adequately work for longer interplanetary missions including Martian links.