On the Role of Communications for Space Domain Awareness

TL;DR

This paper advocates transitioning from centralized to distributed on-orbit communication architectures for Space Domain Awareness, demonstrating significant improvements in latency, scalability, coverage, and resilience over traditional methods.

Contribution

It introduces a shift to on-orbit distribution for SDA, showing its advantages over individual downhaul in scalability, latency, and resilience, and discusses cybersecurity challenges.

Findings

On-orbit distribution reduces latency significantly.

Distributed architecture scales better with more satellites.

Enhanced coverage and resilience compared to centralized systems.

Abstract

Space Domain Awareness (SDA) has become increasingly vital with the rapid growth of commercial space activities and the expansion of New Space. This paper stresses the necessity of transitioning from centralized to distributed SDA architectures. The current architecture predominantly relies on individual downhaul, which we propose to transition to on-orbit distribution. Our results demonstrate that the individual downhaul architecture does not scale efficiently with the increasing number of nodes, while on-orbit distribution offers significant improvements. By comparing the centralized architecture with the proposed distributed architecture, we highlight the advantages of enhanced coverage and resilience. Our findings show that on-orbit distribution greatly outperforms individual downhaul in terms of latency and scalability. Specifically, the latency results for on-orbit distribution are substantially lower and more consistent, even as the number of satellites increases. In addition, we address the inherent challenges associated with on-orbit distribution architecture, particularly cybersecurity concerns. We focus on link security to ensure the availability and integrity of data transmission in these advanced SDA systems. Future expectations include further refinement of on-orbit distribution strategies and the development of robust cybersecurity measures to support the scalability and resilience of SDA systems.