Design and Implementation of a High Efficiency Space Packet Routing Algorithm on a Spacecraft

Abstract

Space packet protocol is a widely used network layer protocol on a spacecraft. A modern spacecraft, such as the Tianhe core module of Chinese space station, has a very complex on-board network. Routing space packets in time is a challenge for such a spacecraft. To solve this problem, we design and implement a high efficiency space packet routing algorithm based on hash routing table. First, we introduce the typical structure of a space packet. Second, we introduce the concept of logical address and hardware address of a space packet. Third, we introduce the construction of the routing table based on the pairs of logical address and hardware address. At last, we implement a routing search algorithm based on the hash table and evaluate the performance the routing algorithm through experiments. We successfully applied the algorithm on the Tianhe core module and achieved good performance.