From Earth-to-Moon Networking: A Software-Defined Temporal Perspective

Considering the scientific and economic opportunities, several public and private organizations are going to establish colonies on the Moon. In particular, lunar colonization can be a first step for deep space missions, and the initial phase is accomplished with the deployment of many Internet of Things (IoT) devices and systems. Therefore, a dedicated Earth-Moon backbone, which results from the combination of terrestrial and lunar satellite segments, must be designed. Considering that its elements are inherently mobile, to ensure the connection, the constituent devices are supposed to be programmed to properly operate during specific time intervals. The features of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm allows achieving this aim. Moreover, the Temporal Networks (TNs) theoretical framework makes it possible to optimize the forwarding rules. In light of these principles, this paper proposes an SDN-based architecture and analyzes the overall communications scenario proposing a specific strategy to optimize the data rate. The performance was evaluated considering the End-to-End (E2E) best path duration, the number of hops, the control packets latency, the power budget and capacity. The results point out that it is feasible to establish a networking strategy on-demand to support the transmission of continuous IoT data flows with limited overhead.