| Near Earth missions and deep space missions will continue to be a majority of future space missions. A long link disruption is inevitable in space communications because of spacecraft rotation, planetary bodies and limited relay capability. A few works have been done with delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) technology for low-Earth orbit (LEO)-satellite and deep space communications and provided feasibility for its adoption in LEO- space and deep space missions. However, no much work has been done to fully evaluate the performance of DTN in such an environment, especially in the presence of long link disruption, data corruption and loss, and link asymmetry. In this thesis, we present an experimental performance evaluation of DTN architecture and protocol stack, with Licklider transmission protocol (LTP) serving as a convergence layer adapter (CLA) underneath bundle protocol (BP), in typical LEO-satellite and deep space communication infrastructures accompanied by a very long link outage, various packet corruption and loss rates, and channel rate symmetry and asymmetry. In addition, we present an experimental investigation of the performance of DTN custody transfer with long link break. The experiment was conducted by performing realistic file transfers over a PC-based test-bed. |
