On the Fine-Grained Distributed Routing and Data Scheduling for Interplanetary Data Transfers

Interplanetary networks (IPNs) are complex communication infrastructures used for data exchange among spacecrafts, rovers and ground stations. Due to the significant delay and uncertainty in communications, efficient routing and data scheduling of interplanetary data transfer (IP-DT) becomes crucial. With the increase of deep space (DS) exploration missions, it would be difficult for existing IPNs to cope with the growing of IP-DT demands. In this work, to improve the performance of IP-DTs in IPNs, we formulate an integer linear programming (ILP) model and design an effective fine-grained distributed routing and data scheduling (FD-RDS) algorithm based on it. We prove that the proposed algorithm is a polynomial-time 2-approximation algorithm for solving the ILP model. Extensive simulations show that our proposals can significantly improve the efficiency and reliability of IPNs. Specifically, our proposals outperforms known benchmarks in terms of both the delivery ratio and E2E latency of IP-DTs.