Satellite High-Speed On-Board Data Handling: From a Wizardlink Equivalent Transceiver To a Full SpaceFibre Interface

Abstract

In the last few years, satellite onboard data-handling bandwidth requirements grew significantly. State-of-the-art solutions, like Space Wire, became not always adequate for up-coming missions: this led to the birth of a significant number of communication protocols and standards, with different features, advantages, and disadvantages. The European Space Agency promoted the development of an open protocol solution: Space-Fibre, whose European Cooperation for Space Standardization standard has been published in May 2019, after an extensive review process. It represents a major advancement as a resulting effort to address the requirements for space missions of the present and the next future. The SpaceFibre protocol can sus-tain a line rate of 6.25 Gbps per lane (up to 16 lanes in parallel). It offers advanced and flexible Quality-of-Service features, as well as Fault Detection Isolation and Recovery services. The pro-tocol structure, comprehending physical, lane, multi-lane, data-link and network layers, has been developed so that full hard-ware implementation of its core layers is straightforward, granting high performances at low price in terms of complexity and power consumption. However, all these features, which make SpaceFibre a solid and powerful solution for future missions, are not always required by smaller lower budget satellites. Indeed, some systems may need only streaming-type CoDecs, without the necessity for advanced error recovery or quality of service. In this paper, we introduce three different designs that address the high-speed requirements of future satellites, gradually intro-ducing more features: a Wizardlink equivalent system, which emulates the behaviour of the well-established Texas Instrument TLK2711 transceiver on an FPGA, providing only low-lane layer features (Encoding, symbol synchronization) and leaving the rest of the layer specifications to the user; a reduced features SpaceFibre CoDec, which is fully compatible with standard-compliant SpaceFibre implementation but largely reduces error recovery features, to obtain a much smaller device; a fully standard-compliant SpaceFibre CoDec. These solutions are all implemented on various FPGA technologies and compared in terms of features and performances, to provide satellite system engineers with a valid reference to better understand which solution could better address their high-speed onboard commu-nication requirements.