Early detection and rejection probability‐based congestion control scheme for deep space networks

Deep Space Networks (DSNs) are a class of DTNs. In such networks, owing to limited radio range and node mobility, end‐to‐end paths between source and destination nodes are not available. Messages are relayed by store‐and‐forward strategy and may be buffered for long periods before being forwarded to the next hop. Therefore, the buffer of message carriers may overflow, and congestion follows. To address this issue, this paper proposes an early detection and rejection probability‐based congestion control algorithm, named ERBA, in which every intermediate node estimates rejection probability when a new message arrives and refuses to receive the message with the rejection probability, so as to avoid congestion. To validate its effectiveness, ERBA is merged into static routing (SR) and dynamic routing (DR). SR and DR are classical routing algorithms for DSNs. The simulation results show that when working with ERBA, the routing overhead of SR and DR decreases rapidly. However, the message delivery ratio also decreases. To deal with this problem, we propose a buffer‐compensation mechanism that effectively reduces the routing overhead for SR and DR without causing the reduction of the message delivery ratio.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.