Integrating Scheduled DTNs and TDMA-based MAC Sublayers: Preliminary Results

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) have been widely studied and indicated as a possible solution to the challenging environment proposed by LEO satellite networking. Despite an abundance of research in the area, most works make simplifying assumptions on the inter-satellite crosslinks to ignore channel access schemes and their corresponding complications. In this work, we analyze the performance of satellite DTN’s when using TDMA channel sharing. We identify two ways of supplying MAC layer information to the DTN routing layer and show significant performance gains by each. Finally, we discuss the complexity trade-offs among the different information sharing schemes.