Performance evaluation of transport protocols for navigation satellite networks

Since one navigation satellite can only be equipped with limited number of ISLs, the navigation satellite network forms a typical space delay/disruption tolerant network (DTN) which poses significant challenges to the design of transport protocol. Generally, the transport protocols can be divided into two categories which are end-to-end and hop-by-hop. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) employed on terrestrial Internet and Space Communication Protocol Specification-Transport Protocol (SCPS-TP) are two representatives of the end-to-end transport protocol while the Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP) proposed by the DTN community is a representative of the hop-by-hop transport protocol. This paper mainly focuses on the simulation analysis of end-to-end and hop-by-hop transport protocol and evaluates the performance of these two kinds of transport protocol in navigation satellite network. Simulation results indicate that hop-by-hop transport protocol can achieve higher network throughput and more balanced network traffic distribution than end-to-end transport protocol.