Date of Award:

12-2012

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Computer Science

Committee Chair(s)

Scott Cannon

Committee

Scott Cannon

Committee

Stephen Clyde

Committee

Vladimir Kulyukin

Committee

Patric Patterson

Committee

Dan Watson

Abstract

In spacecraft engineering, the time and money involved in satellite construction is largely spent on design and integration of custom hardware and software. These efforts are duplicated for nearly every satellite with little to no reuse between spacecraft. There is a huge potential for cost savings in removing the duplication of work. However, there is a lack of standardization in the spaceflight community, causing soaring costs and delayed schedules as each component of a spacecraft is individually designed and custom built.

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has developed the Space Plug-and-Play Architecture (SPA) to address this problem. SPA provides the ability to reuse spacecraft hardware and software components by creating a standard set of protocols used to discover and exchange data between spacecraft components. The first software infrastructure to implement these protocols was called the Satellite Data Model (SDM). After several years of research and development, SPA and the SDM were presented to a team of six industry contractors. Their feedback was that SPA lacked a unified model and the SDM lacked an elegant and scalable networking approach.

This dissertation presents a SPA network model based on the standard Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking model and a new addressing and routing scheme for the SPA network. In order to achieve this new networking approach, the standard SPA networking protocols were redesigned and reimplemented in a new software infrastructure called the SPA Services Manager (SSM). In the SSM, the burden of routing data is handled by the network internals and not by the hardware or software endpoints

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65559a5abb224a1c921c1dfeef5ba0ee

Comments

This work made publicly available electronically on December 21, 2012.

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