Moon to earth DTN communications through lunar relay satellites

Abstract

Although Delay-/DisruptionTolerant Networking, which originated from research on an Interplanetary Internet, has enlarged its scope to encompass all challenged networks, space applications are still one of its most important application fields. This paper deals with DTN communication from Moon to Earth, based on the use of a lunar satellite acting as a "data-mule" to collect data from a Lander located on the far side of the Moon. To make the scenario more interesting and complex from the point of view of possible security threats, we assume that data must be transferred to a non-institutional user connected to the Space Agency Control Centre via Internet. In particular, the paper investigates the state-of-the-art ability of ION, the NASA implementation of the DTN Bundle Protocol (BP), to cope with the many challenges of the space scenario under investigation, such as intermittent links, low bandwidth, relatively high delays, network partitioning, DTN routing, interoperability between LTP and TCP BP Convergence layers and security threats. To this end, the first part of the paper contains three brief overviews of the DTN architecture, the Bundle Security Protocol and the ION implementation. These facilitate comprehension of the following sections, dedicated to a detailed description of the experiment scenario and, most essentially, to the in depth discussion of the numerical results obtained with the latest ION version (3.0).

From the far side of the Moon: Delay/disruption-tolerant networking communications via lunar satellites

“…On the positive side, during the present experiments, we found that an incompatibility issue between BAB and TCP on two hop tests, pointed out in Ref. [18], has now been completely resolved.…”

“…The experiments described in this section, partially presented in Ref. [18], are to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first tests of the BSP ION implementation presented in the open literature.…”

“…one LTP ACK can cover an entire red part block), the rate based congestion control. These characteristics make LTP particularly suitable as convergence layer in space environments [14,18,21,[29][30]. In our experiments, we use LTP for a variety of reasons: resilience to the long delay of the Earth to Moon link (about 1.3 s one way), possibility of exactly matching the available bandwidth and last but not least the compatibility with scheduled links and CGR.…”

“…The authors have already dealt with a part of these topics in Ref. [18], where some preliminary results were also presented. [21][22][23][24][25][26] or on DTN bundle aggregation [27].…”

Applying a Security Architecture with Key Management Framework to the Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks

“…Figure 2 shows how PIB is used to check the authentication and the integrity for multiple hops, usually between endto-end or consecutive nodes. The PIB may be verified by any node to find the PIB-source but does not need to check with the PIB-destination because the key needs to verify the PIB authenticator will be the public key associated with the PIB-source [7].…”