Moving Toward Space Internetworking via DTN: Its Operational Challenges, Benefits, and Management

The international space community has begun to recognize that the established model for management of communications with spacecraft ‐ commanded data transmission over individual pair-wise contacts ‐ is operationally unwieldy and will not scale in suppor t of increasingly complex and sophisticated mission s such as NASA’s Constellation project. Accordingly, the i nternational Inter-Agency Operations Advisory Group (IOAG) i chartered a Space Internetworking Strategy Group (SISG), which released its initial recommendations in a November 2008 report. The report includes a recommendation that the space flight community adopt Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) to address the problem of interoperability and communication scaling, especially in mission environments where there are multiple spacecraft operating in concert. This paper explores some of the issues th at must be addressed in implementing, deploying, and operating DTN as part of a multi-mission, multi-age ncy space internetwork as well as benefits and future operational scenarios afforded by DTN-based space internetworking.