End-to-End ARQ: Transport-Layer Reliability for Airborne Telemetry Networks

Abstract

Due to the mission-critical nature of command-and-control traffic in the telemetry environment, it is imperative that reliable transfer be supported. The AeroTP disruption-tolerant transport protocol is intended for this environment. The mechanism for reliable transfer is ARQ with end-to-end acknowledgments. This has significant performance limitations resulting from the highly-dynamic nature of airborne telemetry networks, since end-to-end paths may not persist long enough for retransmissions to be received. We use ns-3 to analyze the AeroTP ARQ mechanism, along with tunable parameters that may improve performance in reliable transfer mode.