Wireless intra-spacecraft communication with inspaWSN protocol stack based on IR-UWB

Abstract

In recent years, many attempts were made to replace wired connections with wireless communication networks in spacecraft and launchers. The benefits include a simplification of the harness design and routing as well as a reduction of harness cables and thus mass in space systems. However, commonly used wireless communication techniques are less reliable compared to their wired counterparts. Moreover, they are sensitive to RF interferences and multipath fading, which is an important design driver in a spacecraft environment with highly reflective enclosures. This paper presents a novel wireless protocol architecture for intra-spacecraft wireless sensor networks (inspaWSN), which makes use of the impulse-radio ultra wideband (IR-UWB) PHY according to IEEE 802.15.4-2011 and an optimized low latency and deterministic network protocol (LLDN) in order to achieve the strict requirements on existing spacecraft networks, e.g. low and deterministic latency behavior for the attitude and orbit control system (AOCS). The implementation and evaluation of the proposed protocol stack is performed on an STM32 microcontroller network consisting of 3 nodes. The results in this paper show that it is able to fulfill the strict timing requirements in order to accomplish deterministic communication with a latency of 10 ms and less in a typical AOCS configuration.