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Earth-to-Moon Networking: Comparison of End-to-End and DTN Approaches
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DOI：10.1109/maes.2026.3686103.png)
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Abstract
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Planned missions for human exploration of the Moon, and possibly Mars, have aroused great interest in space networks. Because of long propagation delays and link intermittency, space networks are an example of challenged networks, for which the expected solution is the introduction of the delay-/disruption-tolerant networking architecture (DTN) with its associated Bundle Protocol. Recently, however, a few researchers have challenged the need for this architecture, and instead suggested extensions to the Internet Protocol (IP)-based Internet architecture for space, based on the addition of some store-and-forward functionalities to the IP and the use of innovative transport protocols, such as QUIC. The pros and cons of the two different visions have been clearly highlighted by their supporters. Any qualitative reasoning, however, needs to be supported by numbers, thus there is an urgent need for comparative evaluation based on quantitative assessments. The aim of this article is to provide such a comparison in the scenario of Earth-to-Moon communications, focusing on transport protocols. After a comprehensive introduction, performance achievable by TCP and QUIC, used end-to-end, is compared with that of the DTN architecture. A significant novelty is that the work presented here is the first side-by-side comparison of end-to-end QUIC versus DTN with QUICCL/ Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP) under a common testbed. In the Earth-to-Moon scenario considered in numerical evaluations, with a terrestrial 10 Mbit/s bottleneck and 2.5 s round-trip time, the results show that although QUIC outperforms TCP when used end-to-end, DTN architecture can perform better thanks to the isolation of challenges within the hop where they appear, and to the possible use a specialized protocol, LTP, on the space link.
Keywords:
Delay-/Disruption-Tolerant Networking
Inter Planetary Networking
QUIC
Earth to Moon networking
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