Achieving Ordered Data Block Delivery in CCSDS-DTN Space Networks: a Case Study

Future space missions are expected to implement a fully compliant CCSDS-DTN protocol stack in order to exploit the intrinsic store-forward capabilities. DTN technology, however, is not aimed at providing ordered data delivery, which is instead delegated to the application layer. More recently, the DelayTolerant Payload Conditioning (DTPC) has been introduced into the DTN protocol suite in order to mitigate such a limitation, although its interactions with application layer and the rest of the CCSDS protocol stack are not completely understood. To this end, this paper proposes a theoretical model for thoroughly investigating the performance of file-based data transfer through a CCSDS-DTN protocol architecture. A qualitative performance analysis allowed to summarise some important findings about overall protocols’ configuration and the related impact on the overall system performance.