Modeling Disruption Tolerance Mechanisms for a Heterogeneous 5G Network

Abstract

Delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) was proposed as an internetworking architecture to accommodate the frequent and lengthy link disruptions and/or long propagation delays that are typical of a challenging communication environment. The challenging problems of reliable data delivery and effective mission control that are critical in space explorations are a typical application scenario of the DTN technology. Because space communications must integrate seamlessly with terrestrial communications to support efficient flight operations, DTN is designed as an overlay network architecture; as such, it innately supports the highly heterogeneous networks that will be built on 5G technology. In the absence of reliable underlying links, the reliable data delivery services of DTN rely heavily on the custody transfer feature of its core bundle protocol (BP). Little work has been done in theoretical analysis of the performance of BP custodial transfer in a space communication environment in presence of link disruptions. In this paper, we present a study of BP for reliable data delivery in space communications characterized by multiple link disruption events, accompanied by an extremely long propagation delay and data loss. An analytical model is built to estimate the bundle delivery time and transmission goodput performance of BP for bundle delivery over a space channel in the presence of multiple link disruptions. The model is validated by running data-flow experiments using a testbed infrastructure.

Keywords

• DTN
• 5G
• heterogeneous networks
• space-terrestrial networks
• bundle protocol (BP)
• intermittent connectivity