Information Centric Networking for Future Deep Space Networks

With the flourish of the space sensing technology, various space information systems are playing an irreplaceable role in space exploration. Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) has been proposed to cope with the harsh transmission conditions and it provides a store-forward mechanism to push scientific data to Earth. However, in the future, Deep Space Networking (DSN) is bound to be more richer, while the volume of data transmission will rise considerably and communication services will also be diversified including both push-traffic and pull-traffic. In this way, we think DTN still needs to be improved while Content-Centric Networking (CCN) may be another candidate for these challenges. CCN [14] is a novel networking paradigm which has been used for terrestrial network and it provides both push-traffic and pull traffic for different scenes. Besides of it, cache mechanism can effectively reduce the influence arising from increase in data transmission. Therefore, we think CCN may be a better solution for future Deep Space Networking.