Abstract: Intermittent connectivity destroyed the building blocks of the traditional network-end-to-end principle, and the space network further posed a great challenge because of the characteristics of long, variable latency, low band width,high noise and so on asymmetric links. This paper analyzed the essence and definition of intermittent connectivity, and revisited the fundamental tradeoff between end-to-end and hop-by-hop to discuss the performance of basic store and-forward mechanism under the intermittent connectivity environment. The analysis and the simulation result indicated that the performance of hop-by-hop way is usually higher than end-to-end in wireless multiple-hop space network.However, it's disadvantage is the higher protocol complexity and additional memory and processing requirements.

Key words: Intermittent connectivity,Space network, Store-and-forward