Providing the Enabling Technology for the Next Generation Spacecraft On?Board Communications: SpaceFibre Implementation and Instrumentation

Space missions have seen the increasing use of more advanced and capable devices, producing unprecedented data. Data of great interest, but also of very large amount. We are witnessing an escalation of data transmission speed requirements for spacecraft on board communications, to transfer this large amount of data in the same time frame. This is forcing system integrators to find novel and more efficient strategies and protocols, in order to sustain the higher throughput that it is required. Indeed, data‑rate requirements have already reached an order of magnitude of tens of gigabit‑per‑second. Current solutions are inadequate to meet these challenges. Therefore, European Space Agency is supporting the definition of a new open communication standard, named SpaceFibre. The new protocol aims to address performance requirements, reduce complexity and, consequently, costs. SpaceFibre has yet to penetrate markets. Most alternatives are derived from information technology industry standards, which are not open‑sourced. Emphasis is placed specially on the challenges that have been overcome to define all system architecture specifications, to partition hardware and software designs and to identify the best platform targets, along with to define new effective workflow for the implementation and testing. Conclusions are drawn about potential and applications of this work, quantified in terms of achieved performance, utilization, power consumption and accomplished objectives.