This joint workshop, hosted by the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (Surrey) and Virginia Tech, is part of Professor Jonathan Black's IAS Fellowship. It will bring together the transatlantic team and interested observers to demonstrate deploying and interconnecting network emulators.
This collaborative project brings together international investigators to develop a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) platform that facilitates the research, development, and experimentation with adaptive communications for multi-constellation space network coexistence. SpaceNet is the first-of-its-kind, fully open-source HIL space network testbed that is able to emulate a fast-changing network topology with changing connectivity and latencies, challenging routing, transport protocols, and re-architecting applications. The testbed currently under development will uniquely support multiple networks of distributed heterogeneous platforms in multiple domains, addressing challenges in adaptive communications for multi-constellation coexistence, emulating what has been called the “internet of space things”. Direct connectivity allows for the exploration of how satellites and constellations might interconnect without revealing proprietary information of each constellation, creating the equivalent of interdomain routing for space networks. Additional capabilities examine behavior in the face of disruptions such as large solar storms. Achieving these new capabilities requires merging lab-based spacecraft hardware with a large-scale state-of-the-art wireless radio testbed to create more flexible and higher fidelity rendering of the satellite links, resulting in a networked HIL development and a testing environment that accurately models the network and dynamics; routing and re-routing data link tables on the fly, scaled to multiply-redundant algorithms and architectures; satellite-like lab hardware for testbed nodes; and virtual nodes and remote access for government, industry, and academic researchers.
The project repository for all code, examples, and publications is available at the following page, and will be used for sharing research updates, workshop livestreams, dataset, code, and preprints. SpaceNet was originally jointly funded by the Institute for Advanced Studies (Surrey), the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (VT), NGIAtlantic.eu, and is currently supported by the National Science Foundation.
Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash
The report for this workshop is coming soon, please check back later.