Recent Developments in Space Communication Architectures

A revived interest in space communication has been initiated by major space agencies since the early of this millennium. Globally, a significant growth of national space programs has been achieved by a number of nations including the USA, Europe, Russia, India and China. Industrially, there is a trend for privatizing the space industry. This will lead to new space communication age opening new horizons for multi-billion dollars space communication enterprises. Recently, there has become a global interest for establishing a new generation of commercial space communication architectures. A number of space communication architectures and protocols have been proposed by NASA, JPL, CCSDS and BBN. All of these architectures aim to provide an extensive multi-party access to space explorations deployed at three geographical zones: earth, near space and deep space. In paper, seminar, we present some of the recent developments in space communication architectures. First, we describe the space communication environments in terms of their geography, and features. Second we survey four leading space communication architectures namely OMNI, CCSDS, Hi-DSN and SpaceVPN. Finally, we provide a detailed evaluation discussion demonstrating the points of strengths and weakness of each of these architectures. Finally, it is shown that the OMNI architecture will serve the demands of future near space missions, while SpaceVPN will be the de facto architecture serving the demands of deep space explorations.