On storage dynamics of space delay/disruption tolerant network node

Delay/disruption tolerant network (DTN) plays a promising role in prospected information infrastructures for future space activities, such as Interplanetary Internet (IPN) or Solar System Internet (SSI). Over such long-haul and intermittent links, DTN technique makes scientific data return end-to-end reliable by the typical custody transfer and store-and-forward mechanism. Due to lack of enough space spacecrafts deployed for DTN, now and in the near decades, there will be some intermediary nodes which would carry a large proportion of network traffic as DTN routers. Consequently, the behaviors and capabilities of managing bundles in the intermediary nodes would have impacts on the data transport over space DTN. Focusing on the storage dynamics of bundles, in this paper, we propose an analytical framework based on two-dimension Markov chain to evaluate the behaviors of bundles delivery in DTN intermediate nodes. Accordingly, a delay model and a transmission success probability model for bundles delivery over space DTN are developed separately, both dependent closely on the sojourn time in node storages. The evaluation results indicate that: (1) Dividing the source files into bigger bundles for transmission causes a longer storage-occupancy time on intermediary nodes; (2) bundle sizes have more explicit impacts on the storage-occupancy time at a node than segment sizes do; and (3) the transmission success probability of a bundle is more dependent on a DTN bundle size than on a LTP segment size.