Achieving High Goodput Performance in Mars Missions Through Application Layer Coding and Transmission Power Trading

Transferring data reliably from Mars to Earth stations is becoming an appealing challenge in the design of interplanetary networks. In this view, the use of CCSDS-based protocols along with erasure codes is a promising candidate for mitigating the performance degradation due to large propagation delays and high packet loss rates. Besides, the constraints imposed on the transmission power and on the available link bandwidth introduce further challenges to the design of the telecommunication system. In this paper, the benefits brought are investigated by tuning properly erasure code rate at the upper layers, pointing out the performance gain in terms of goodput performance and analyzing power consumption and bandwidth usage issues, as well.