An erasure coding-based loss-tolerant file delivery protocol for deep spacecommunications

In deep space communications, huge delay, asymmetric bandwidth, large BER and packet loss ratio and intermittent link hinder the adoption of terrestrial transmission protocols. To decrease file delivery time, consultative committee for space data systems (CCSDS) file delivery protocol (CFDP) replaces acknowledge (ACK) by negative acknowledge (NAK) and simplifies the procedures of link establishment and link removal. However, feedback information cannot be avoided in CFDP; hence the file delivery performance cannot be further improved. Motivated by the idea of erasure coding, a one-way reliable transmission protocol named loss-tolerant file deliver protocol (LTFDP) that is suitable for deep space long-range file deliveryis proposed in this paper. For LTFDP, if a certain percent of the data segments interweaved by explorers is received, the original data can be de-interweaved successfully by Earth stations; hence reliable transmission is accomplished without NAK or ACK. Obviously, the Earth stations have enough power and memory resources for the iteration process of de-interweaving. In a shorter distance communications scenario such as from the Moon to the Earth, performance of LTFDP is greatly impacted by file size and transmission rate. In contrast, propagation delay is the main factor of file delivery time in a longer distance communication scenario, e.g. from the Mars to the Earth. This paper demonstrated that LTFDP can not only diminish file delivery time greatly and improve goodput by feedback-reduced transmission, but also improve the reliability of deep space communications.