Performance of multimedia rate control protocols in InterPlaNetary Internet

The communication requirements of the next generation space missions necessitate to address the challenges for the realization of the InterPlaNetary (IPN) Internet. The multimedia flows carrying audio and visual information, including planet images and scientific observations, will constitute significant portion of the traffic in the IPN Internet. In this letter, the effects of propagation delay, link errors, and blackouts on the throughput performance of multimedia rate control protocols are investigated in IPN Internet. The analytical observations and experimental results show that the existing multimedia rate control protocols are far from satisfying the IPN Internet communication requirements.