The increasing speed of space exploration and the growing demand for interplanetary and non-terrestrial connectivity necessitate the development of scalable and efficient communication network architectures. These architectures must effectively manage end-to-end communication for a rising number of bursty data flows in applications like remote inference, monitoring, and automation. A key challenge is the presence of variable delays and disruptions, which can hinder real-time communication and prevent end-to-end acknowledgements. This project addresses this challenge by applying recent advancements in goal or task-oriented communication, focusing on three core objectives:

(1) Establishing principles and decision metrics for goal-oriented sampling and multi-user scheduling, capable of managing highly variable delay processes with memory.

(2) Developing random access policies for massive machine-type communications that replace exogenous arrivals with goal-oriented traffic shaping.

(3) Designing flow control mechanisms that leverage the cross-layer operability between the application and link layers of Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocols.

By achieving these goals, the project aims to enable efficient data flow on space networks, utilizing significantly fewer resources compared to current methods. This will provide the necessary scalability for the expansion of interplanetary and non-terrestrial networks (NTN). To ensure timely dissemination of results to the space community and contribute to the development of the upcoming 6G standard, the project includes collaborations with experts in Aerospace and Satellite Networks, along with experimentation using real-world satellites and DTN protocols.