LTP Specification and Implementation

LTP is the acronym for Licklider Transmission Protocol being designed as a deep-space reliable datalink layer protocol to operate over long-haul deep-space RF datalinks, which exhibit extremely high transmission delays due to the scale of the distances involved, intermittent connectivity due to the planetary and stellar ephemerides, high bit error-rates, and other constraints unique to this environment. Although it has been primarily designed with deep-space in mind, there are other terrestrial communication environments that are similarly challenged in which LTP could be of use.

The protocol is specified in three internet-drafts currently, which are available in the LTP specification homepage : LTP.

The current release of our LTP Reference Implementation is available here : LTP-RI-1.2.1.jar

The RI is implemented in Java 1.5; Therefore you would need Java 1.5 SDK, or atleast the 1.5 JRE to run it. It is distributed under the terms of the OCP-License. The installation instructions are wrapped inside this Java archive (which you may unarchive using : jar xvf LTP-RI-1.2.1.jar) in the README file. Javadoc generated browse-able documentation is available under the doc directory (start from index.html).

You are welcome to email the author Manikantan Ramadas, at mramadas@irg.cs.ohiou.edu with your comments/thoughts/suggestions.