Testing MDP in a simulated space channel environment
The performance of the Multicast Dissemination Protocol (MDP) in a simulated satellite channel is investigated. The environment that is modeled is that to be expected in a small satellite communications environment including channel errors and link interruptions. The anticipated operating mode for these satellites is to transfer file-oriented sensor data to ground-based earth and space science investigators. The satellite link is simulated with a channel environment simulator. The performance of MDP is compared with file transfer protocol (ftp) acting as a standard basis. In these experiments, we find that MDP does not perform as well as ftp in the high-quality channel, although the performance difference is small. MDP does perform better than ftp in low-quality channels. MDP is also able to resume data transmissions when a link outage occurs. MDP is seen as being a viable option for use in small satellite communications systems.