The government and the space industry consider expanding Internet into space by developing a standard protocol suite based on the long-standing, successful and robust terrestrial Internet protocol suite such as TCP/IP. Due to significant differences in communication environments, operation in space poses a number of challenges to these protocols in providing reliable, end-to-end data communication with a tolerable level of service. This project is to develop an in-laboratory space network link simulator for studying Internet-type protocols for their uses in space communications. The simulator will be used for modeling communication channels, particularly space and wireless channels, for studying the protocols. The simulator will be developed using the National Instruments LabVIEW programming language to model the Internet-channel characteristics experienced in transmitting data in space and wireless environments. These characteristics include user-selectable bit-error-rate (BER), link delay, variable channel data rates and simulated channel outage conditions.

This project is partially supported by Lamar University Research Council under Research Enhancement Grant, Fall 2002.