Project Summary

Our project, funded by ERC, seeks to transform space communication by pioneering goal-oriented strategies that optimize the transport of machine type flows in space networks. Key advancements include the development of principles for goal-oriented sampling, scheduling, random access, and flow control specifically tailored for unique challenges facing space networks.

The GO SPACE project, led by Prof. Dr. Elif Uysal, Fellow, IEEE. Located in Middle East Technical University, Ankara, TURKIYE, the project also includes collaboration and staff exchange with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Munich, Germany. The project aims to unlock the capacity of space networks through layer-2 and above innovations, bridging gaps between terrestrial and non-terrestrial communication standards including 6G-NTN and DTN.

The accelerated pace of space exploration, interplanetary and non-terrestrial connectivity calls for scalable and efficient communication network architectures that can achieve end-to-end effectiveness for increasing numbers of bursty flows, occurring in applications such as remote inference, monitoring and automation. This is made challenging by the variable delays and disruptions that sometimes preclude real-time communication and end-to-end acknowledgements. We propose to tackle this fundamental challenge by leveraging insight and methods from the recent progress in the area of goal or task-oriented communication, by setting three fundamental goals:

Principles and decision metrics for goal-oriented sampling and multi-user scheduling, that can handle highly variable delay processes that contain memory
Random access policies for massive machine-t type communications that replace exogeneous arrivals with goal- oriented traffic shaping
Flow control mechanisms that exploit the cross-layer operability at application and link layers of Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocols Through achieving these objectives we will enable effective data flow on space networks using a fraction of the resources with respect to the state-of-the-art, which will provide the required scalability for the growth of interplanetary and non-terrestrial networks (NTN). To ensure the timely transfer of results to the space community, as well as the beneficial impact to the upcoming 6G standard, GO SPACE includes collaborations with specialists in Aerospace and Satelite Networks, and experimentation on real-world satellites and DTN protocols.