As missions become more complex, involving multi-element multi-hop communications, between multiple agencies and private actors, the need to manage and transfer large amounts of data will increase. Manually controlling such missions becomes increasingly difficult and costly to a point where a more automated approach becomes necessary. The emerging DTN [1] standards show promise in fulfilling this need. Given the nature of space communications, a network layer for interconnecting space resources becomes appealing. This layer also undertakes a role to provide interoperability, allow for dynamic routing, integrate agency policies and guarantee reliability using a store-and forward architecture. This new architecture introduces new communication concepts suitable for Space Communications, such as the custody transfer, which inherently guarantees reliability, the permanent storage capacity, which collaborates well with the delay-tolerance required in space communications, and interoperability, which matches the requirements for inter-agency/private-actors missions. In this activity we propose to develop the necessary software and adapt for use on the OPS SAT experimental platform (spacecraft and ground segment) the open source implementation of the Bundle Protocol [2] called ION DTN [3] to demonstrate automation in Spacecraft Control and CFDP [4] based file transfers, using a DTN network architecture.
