Autonomic context-aware management in interplanetary communications systems

Maintaining connectivity in deep-space communications is of critical importance to key missions and the ability to adapt node behavior “on-the-fly” can have dynamic benefits. Autonomic operation minimizes failure risk by performing local configurations using collected context data and on-board policies, improving response time to events, and reducing remote mission management expense. Herein, we evaluate cost-benefit impacts when a context-aware brokering algorithm developed to achieve autonomy is applied to interplanetary communications systems.