Comsat Laboratories is developing a Space Communications Test Bed (SCT) for the NASA Human and Robotics Technology program (H&RT). The complex SCT project will provide NASA engineers with a communications test bed to emulate end-to-end communications in all kinds of space network scenarios:

• Remote surface platforms
• Planetary orbiter
• Relay stations
• Earth orbit satellites
• Earth stations
• User clients

Pulling Together A Variety of Technologies
The distributed and diverse nature of inter-planetary nodes and links pose a set of unique considerations in emulation. Special design attention is being given to client applications, scalable network speeds from kilobits per second to gigabits per second, target environments, platform diversity, distributed databases, and non-robust/anomalous conditions.

The Comsat Labs team is drawing from its expertise in many technologies, including optimizing communications links, protocol stacks, operational parameters, and mission applications using temporal emulation of channel characteristics and mission traffic profiling. Emerging architectures and protocols for backbone, access, and proximity networking will consist of a series of enhancements to Internet and CCSDS technologies. The final design will be an extensible framework to host and test the technology enhancements in an incremental, iterative fashion.