Adaptive Erasure Coding Schemes for Interplanetary Networks with Incomplete Channel Side Information

Providing effective telecommunication services over interplanetary networks poses a number of open challenges because of severe impairments exhibited in such environment. In this perspective, this work proposes a coding framework, integrated within the delay tolerant network (DTN) architecture, implementing adaptive erasure coding schemes that rely upon partial observation of the transmission channel dynamics. Three main protocol solutions based upon partial observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and incremental redundancy adaptation (IRA) have been devised and analysed under different scenario configurations. The performance analysis showed promising results and the superiority of the proposed solutions with respect to approaches based upon fixed- rate coding strategies.