Analysis of the Block Delivery Time of the Licklider Transmission Protocol

The Licklider transmission protocol is a point-to-point communication protocol designed for space links, which commonly involve extreme delays, disruptions, and lossy transmissions. The protocol sends application data in blocks, which in turn are sent in segments. It achieves reliable block delivery through multiple transmission rounds, each one re-sending the segments lost during the previous round. This retransmission process drives protocol performance. We derive exact and approximate methods to find the average number of rounds per block. Then, we estimate the block delivery time and other metrics using this value. We found that the common practice of matching segment lengths to the maximum transfer unit of the link layer may lead to suboptimal performance. The models provide accurate protocol performance prediction, which can help to optimize protocol parameters for specified operating conditions.