A Reference Framework for Emergent Space Communication Architectures oriented on Galactic Geography

An exuberant space age is emergent, which is likely to see many compact yet innovative explorations much beyond imagined in the past requiring a reusable and sharable space communication infrastructure. Currently proposed space communication architectures mainly suffer from three design drawbacks high cost, narrowed scale and lack of concise geographical organization. Therefore, there has been a renewed interest for developing a new generation of architectures addressing these design drawbacks. Recently, a set of architectures have been proposed by NASA, JPL, CCSDS and BBN contributing towards the architectural design of the next generation space networks. However, it is not pretty simple proposals to determine there completeness, cost-efficiency and their capability to address varied communication and challenges of space environments. In this paper we backward one step, we describe a holistic framework for space communication. We identify the major constraints of space environment imposed by the galactic geography. We also outline a sufficiently complete design space of the plausible range of communication modalities this age of space communication might require. These requirements are based on the path and link concurrency and non concurrency based classification including edge and core mobility, link intermittency, and schedulability. Moreover, we survey three leading architectures namely OMNI, CCSDS and SpaceVPN. We show their extent of completeness, strengths, weaknesses, and what communication modalities they support and what they do not. In was shown that OMNI architecture will have the potential to serve near space mission missions, while SpaceVPN will be the architecture of next space age serving large scale deep space missions.