Space Link Extension (SLE) Emulation for High Data Rate Network Communication

As the data rate requirements for space communications increases, significant stress is placed not only on the wireless satellite communication links, but also on the ground networks which forward data from end-users to remote ground stations. These wide area network (WAN) connections add delay and jitter to the end-to-end satellite communication link, effects which can have significant impacts on the wireless communication link. It is imperative that any ground communication protocol can react to these effects such that the ground network does not become a bottleneck in the communication path to the satellite. In this paper, we present our SCENIC Emulation Lab testbed which was developed to test the CCSDS SLE protocol implementations proposed for use on future NASA communication networks. Our results show that in the presence of realistic levels of network delay, high-throughput SLE communication links can experience significant data rate throttling. Based on our observations, we present some insight into why this data throttling happens, and trace the probable issue back to non-optimal blocking communication which is supported by the CCSDS SLE API recommended practices. These issues were presented as well to the SLE implementation developers which, based on our reports, developed a new release for SLE which we show fixes the SLE blocking issue and greatly improves the protocol throughput. In this paper, we also discuss future developments for our end-to-end emulation lab and how these improvements can be used to develop and test future space communication technologies.