QoS enhancement in space data communication: a network coding approach.

With the rapid increase of space applications, the amount of information to be transmitted between spacecrafts and ground stations increases exponentially and space–sky–ground Transport Control Protocol (TCP) network is highly demanded. However, the traditional TCP cannot be directly applied to space data communication. This article deeply studies the TCP/Network Coding (NC), which can effectively improve terrestrial wireless communication system throughput. Combined with characteristics of Space Communication Protocol Specification-Transport Protocol (SCPS-TP) and advantages of terrestrial TCP/NC, an improved protocol referred to as SCPS-TP/NC, is proposed for space data communication. This article provides detailed process of protocol design, mathematical modelling and throughput analysis of the proposed SCPS-TP/NC. Finally, we implement the SCPS-TP/NC protocol and evaluate its performance by Network Simulator (Version 2). Simulation results show that SCPS-TP/NC can effectively increase the end-to-end system throughput, reduce the packet loss rate, shorten the transmission delay and improve the Quality of Service (QoS) of space data communication to a certain degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]