NC-STP: A high performance network coding based space transport protocol

Abstract

Because of the long propagation delay and high PERs in space links, a proper transport protocol is required to transmit data reliably and effectively in space networks. To meet that demand, the Delay/Disruption Tolerant Network (DTN) is proposed, which calls for new designed principles in order to achieve efficient and reliable communication between DTN peers. In this paper, we propose a novel Network Coding based Space Transport Protocol (NC-STP) as a transport scheme for the space network. The NC-STP combines the advantages of auto retransmission and network coding, while at the same time keeps its controlling mechanism very simple. Known from other solutions, NCSTP retransmits the line combination of original packets instead of the original packets themselves and can transmit files in a continuous manner. We evaluate the performance of NC-STP both theoretically and experimentally. The results reveal that NC-STP can achieve better performance than DSTP.