Security Standards for Space-Terrestrial Internetworks: A Multi-Dimensional Approach to Securing Shared Circuits
Edward J. Birrane, Vignesh Ramachandran, Samantha K. Jacobs · SpaceOps 2014 Conference · 2014
THE increasing data collection capability of space platforms, from cislunar to deep-space missions, is outpacing the downlink capacity of legacy telecommunications architectures. Legacy point-to-point streaming data service models require spacecraft to downlink directly to preselected ground antennas to telemeter their entire data volume. Improvements to spacecraft design and launch services in both commercial and government sectors are increasing the number of space assets and improvements in payload technologies allowed for the collection of increasingly large data sets on increasingly smaller space platforms. Together, these trends produce data volumes that congest existing TT&C (tracking, telemetry, and control) links. This congestion results in additional costs to build new ground stations, shifts to less congested frequencies (X-, Ka-, and Ku-band), higher prices for existing link services, and, ultimately, fewer link opportunities. The foreseeable economic climate for space science necessitates a frugality that cannot support scaling inefficient legacy architectures. In addition to expanding the number of ground systems, multiple space agencies are pursuing technologies to more efficiently share space and ground telecommunications assets. One such effort, delay-tolerant networking (DTN), standardizes the multipath, multihop, packetized data definitions necessary to create internetworks from space and ground assets. DTN provides an Internet-style data exchange to space communications challenged by the link disruptions and signal propagation delays that prevent the smooth operation of terrestrial protocols such as the Internet protocol (IP) [1]. Packetized internetworking relieves congestion in space-to-ground