Track 5: Services and Applications

Role of a ground system in the design of space ground network is to exchange information between the space fleet and the end users. In order to maintain secure, reliable communication and provide situational awareness, a ground system needs to choreograph services between heterogeneous interfaces of various key elements in the ground system architecture. The choice of Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services provides a cost effective and scalable solution to integrate disparate software interfaces of the ground system. The two major concepts in the web service technology are SOAP and REST. While SOAP is a protocol to transfer information between two end points, REST principles concentrate on representing resource state information using resource identifiers. The paper discusses merits and de-merits of each approach in the integration of space ground system's heterogeneous interfaces. The paper starts with the large grain description of a typical space ground system, followed by a discussion of SOAP and REST principles. A comparison of the SOAP and REST based approaches in the design and integration of a ground system has been discussed. Finally the paper concludes with a discussion of recent trends in the techniques of web services