Joint Application of CCSDS File Delivery Protocol and Erasure Coding Schemes over Space Communications

The rising demand for multimedia services even in hazardous environments, such as space missions and military theatres, and the consequent need of proper internetworking technologies have revealed the inapplicability of TCP/IP architectures and highlighted the importance of the communication features provided by the protocol architectures proposed by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS). This paper proposes a CCSDS File Delivery Protocol (CFDP) extension, based on the implementation of erasure coding schemes, in order to assure high reliability to the data communication even in presence of very critical conditions, such as hard shadowing, deep fading periods and intermittent links. Different encoding techniques are considered and various channel conditions, in terms of Bit Error Ratio and bandwidth values, are tested.