Flexible and Dynamic Communication Architecture for Lunar Exploration

We present work related to designing a communication network for lunar exploration. We discuss the important requirements for future space missions that influence the design of this network. We list some characteristics of the network, and highlight important issues and constraint related to performance, cost, and future network evolution. We address issues related to efficiency, fairness, end-to-end delay minimization and Quality-of-Service (QoS) framework in order to enable a flexible access and dynamic mission operation. To provide optimal or near-optimal efficient utilization and fair allocation of bandwidth of the downlink channel while guaranteeing specific QoS requirements for different service classes, we propose two-level (long-term static and short-term dynamic) sharing of a slotted high data rate satellite communication link. The long-term optimal bandwidth allocation is implemented to provide per-stream/per-user QoS guarantee and give the inputs to the next level, short-term dynamic bandwidth allocation. In our time-varying short-term bandwidth allocation with threshold regulation, a small portion of bandwidth is still assigned to all active spacecrafts in advance, but most bandwidth is dynamically allocated by the requests from them, per frame, by solving an optimal timeslot scheduling problem.