Adding Quality of Service Support to Bundle Protocol Through an Extension Block

The Bundle Protocol (BP) was designed to address the challenges inherent in space communications. While already in use in several projects led by various space agencies, including the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), there is a need to expand BP's capabilities, including in Quality of Service (QoS) support, an area currently lacking standardization. This document proposes a dual QoS support block for BP which facilitates the definition of QoS requirements at the source in an immutable manner while allowing dynamic adjustments by networks or subnetworks. Furthermore, preliminary results are presented, analyzing the effects of the proposed traffic prioritization system and the weighted queue management. These results show improved end-to-end delay for time-sensitive information, and a higher rate of achieved QoS requirements for all priority classes, as well as a fairer approach to network scheduling.

I. Introduction

Bundle Protocol (BP) was created along with Delay- and Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTN) with the goal of overcoming the specific challenges posed by space communications. Since its initial publication in 2007 (RFC 5050) [2], BP has gone through a series of modifications until reaching its current version, BP version 7 (RFC 9171) [3]. Thanks to the advantages it offers over other alternatives, it is already being used in experiments and projects carried out by several space agencies, including the METERON project from the European Space Agency (ESA) [4], the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) from the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) [5] or the BP-based communication between payloads at the International Space Station (ISS) and ground nodes as an effort between multiple agencies, including ESA and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) [6].