Towards Software Defined SpaceWire Networks

In the recent few years, Software Defined Network (SDN) brings a revolution to network technology. Comparing with the traditional techniques, SDN has several distinguished features, including fine-grained flows management, global view of the network and centralized control, etc. Since SpaceWire is becoming a standard for high-speed links and networks for use onboard spacecraft, we argue that adopting the idea of SDN into SpaceWire networks will bring several advantages, including open network topology, fine-grained control and QoS, etc. In this paper, we propose a new software defined SpaceWire network architecture: SDSpW. In SDSpW, the core of SpaceWire network contains three roles: controller, router and end-nodes. The controller plays a center role in managing the routing, switch within the whole network, while SDSpW router adopts the control-forward separation philosophy. In the forwarding plane, SDSpW integrates a fine-grained flow technology by importing a multi-field flow table. With the introduction of flow table, SDSpW make it easy to fine grained flow control and ensures the end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS). In the control plane, SDSpW controller and router run openSpW, a customized protocol on top of SpaceWire - RMAP. We also conduct several experiments in the environment of mininet to evaluate the performance of SDSpW. Experimental results show that the controller can monitor the state of whole network in real time, which makes the maintenance and management more easily. Moreover, the end-to-end QoS is guaranteed.