Hop-by-Hop Local Flow Control over InterPlaNetary Networks Based on DTN Architecture

Deep space communications are an important research line in scientific community. The possibility of performing the communication between earth and other planets is an excitant challenge. The main issue of the communication between planet, called interplanetary (IPN) communication, is the intermittent visibility due to planet movement and the long propagation delay. In order to solve these problems a delay tolerant network (DTN) has been deployed. DTN is an architecture particularly useful in scenarios where very long transmission delays or intermittent connectivity are present, such as IPN network. The routers in DTN perform a transmission mechanism similar to the model of mail transfer protocols or the store-and-forward and it permits to determine a hop-by-hop based messages exchange. Our main contribute in this paper is the introduction of an asynchronous congestion control mechanism on the network that it is not present in the traditional DTN protocol. This control tries to resolve buffer overflow, link saturation and useless retransmission problems in order to better utilize the overall system.