RCP-Planet: a rate control protocol for InterPlaNetary Internet

UDP traffic is a part of the aggregate traffic over InterPlaNetary Internet backbone links, which includes planet images and multimedia data from some scientific observations. Existing rate control schemes cannot solve the rate control problem in InterPlaNetary Internet which is characterized by extremely long propagation delays, high link errors, asymmetrical bandwidth, and blackouts. In this paper, a rate control protocol, RCP-Planet, is proposed to address all the above challenges. RCP-Planet consists of two novel algorithms, i.e. Begin State and Operational State. The protocol is based on a novel rate probing mechanism, i.e. sending probing sequences to capture the available bandwidth. A new rate control scheme is designed to update the transmission rate based on the observed rate for the probing sequence. Tornado codes are used for packet-level FEC because of their fast encoding and decoding speed. Bandwidth asymmetry problem is addressed by FEC block-level ACKs. Moreover, RCP-Planet incorporates Blackout State into the protocol to improve performance in blackout conditions. Simulation results show that RCPPlanet achieves high throughput performance, fairness, and is delay tolerant. Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.