A case study on optimizing communications for constellation space missions

A number of NASA future space missions would employ a new topology, consisting of large numbers of distributed, highly coordinated small spacecraft performing a unified scientific observation task. This new class of constellation-based missions will introduce a number of new network control, data management and communication problems that need to be addressed and can provide mission planners with a variety of design trade-offs and additional capabilities in their attempt to satisfy the scientific objectives of their mission. We have started developing a framework for analyzing and studying the operational communication trade-offs for typical constellation mission classes. In this paper we address the communication requirements of constellation space missions in general and, using as an example one mission currently in the planning, the Magnetospheric Multi-Scale mission, we study an appropriate dynamic routing algorithm and list some preliminary simulation model results of the communication link performance. We also discuss ideas about possible future work in this area.