Energy saving scheme of delay/disruption tolerant network in deep space communications
Yang Wang, Hong Yang, Xiaoguang Chen, Jiali Zheng, Song Chen, Kai Ding · 2016
Delay/Disruption Tolerant Network (DTN) is playing an important role in the future space communications, especially the deep space communications. The available energy resources on the spacecraft are very limited and sometimes may become very scarce. In such conditions, the extra transmission effort is required as small as possible, to achieve the goal of saving energy resources. Current studies indicate that the packet sizes of DTN protocol layers such as bundle size, LTP block size, and Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP) segment size have an impact on the extra transmission effort, but the studies are lack of theoretical model and analysis. Therefore, a theoretical model of extra transmission effort is proposed in terms of BP/LTP protocol stack, which can be applied to DTNs using other convergence layer protocol besides LTP. What's more, an analysis is made to the theoretical model and a scheme of saving the energy resources by optimizing the packet sizes of DTN protocol layers is presented. The numerical evaluation results show that this scheme can effectively conserve the energy consumption of the spacecraft, which can be a good solution to the scarcity of energy resources in space missions.