Performance of a Delay-Tolerant Protocol over Point-to-Point LEO-Satellite Communication Links: An Experimental Approach

The performance evaluation of delay-tolerant CFDP is seen in the literatures. In this work, we focus on experimental performance investigation of the delay-tolerant CFDP in the deferred NAK mode over a simulated low earth orbit (LEO)-satellite communication link. A rate-based transmission protocol is taken as a reference. This work is to see how the delay-tolerant CFDP protocol performs over a LEO- satellite link delay, especially when compounded with a high bit- error-rate (BER). The investigation results show that the rate- based protocol shows superior throughput performance over both symmetric and asymmetric channels, especially at higher BERs. Quantitatively, the throughput advantage of the rate- based protocol over CFDP-TCP in symmetric channel at BER=10"5 is approximately 2200 bytes/sec, and in asymmetric channel is approximately 8500 bytes/sec.