Design of a fault-tolerant satellite cluster link establishment protocol

The design of a protocol for satellite cluster link establishment and management that accounts for link corruption, node failures, and node re-establishment is presented in this paper. This protocol will need to manage the traffic flow between nodes in the satellite cluster, adjust routing tables due to node motion, allow for sub-networks in the cluster, and similar activities. This protocol development is in its initial stages. Preliminary results with eight nodes demonstrate its operations and potential problems that may arise when significant numbers of channel errors are present