Design and Development of a Visual Simulation Tool for Interplanetary Networking (IPN)

Faculty-development competitive research grants program for 2023-2025

Space exploration has witnessed tremendous attention in the recent years from the government agencies, private companies and public in general. Deep space missions require sophisticated space communication technology and building a communication system specific for each mission can be costly. Furthermore, when different space agencies want to collaborate, the lack of standardized communication architecture between them leads to expensive interface development efforts. Recent trend has been focused on building a common communication infrastructure towards Interplanetary Internet (IPN) that all spacecraft in the solar system can benefit.

Space communication systems imposes significant differences with the communication systems on Earth. First of all, the distance between the communicating nodes in space is incomparably large that leads to extensive propagation delays. In addition, the nodes and the celestial objects are in constant motion which significantly complicates the line-of-sight communication. In case of radio communication, there is also solar radiation interference which degrades the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the link. Therefore, future IPN will require novel network architectures that are resistant to large/variable delays and frequent disconnections between the nodes. Today, Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) is seen as a potential networking technology to address these challenges for IPNs.

The overall aim of this project is to significantly increase the scientific understanding and the technical knowledge on DTN based IPN architecture by exploring and developing novel network models and methods. Towards this aim, we will develop a visual simulation tool that allows users to create solar system wide IPN topologies and analyze the performance of DTN based IPN.