ACCELERATING REAL-TIME SPACE DATA PACKET PROCESSING

Abstract

NASA’s use of high bandwidth packetized Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) telemetry in future missions presents a great challenge to ground data system developers. These missions, including the Earth Observing System (EOS), call for high data rate interfaces and small packet sizes. Because each packet requires a similar amount of protocol processing, high data rates and small packet sizes dramatically increase the real-time workload on ground packet processing systems. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has been developing packet processing subsystems for more than twelve years. Implementations of these subsystems have ranged from mini-computers to single-card VLSI multiprocessor subsystems. The latter subsystem, known as the VLSI Packet Processor, was first deployed in 1991 for use in support of the Solar Anomalous & Magnetospheric Particle Explorer (SAMPEX) mission. An upgraded version of this VMEBus card, first deployed for Space Station flight hardware verification, has demonstrated sustained throughput of up to 50 Megabits per second and 15,000 packets per second. Future space missions including EOS will require significantly higher data and packet rate performance. A new approach to packet processing is under development that will not only increase performance levels by at least a factor of six but also reduce subsystem replication costs by a factor of five. This paper will discuss the development of a next generation packet processing subsystem and the architectural changes necessary to achieve a thirty-fold improvement in the performance/price of real-time packet processing.