Emulating and Verifying Sensing, Computation, and Communication in Distributed Remote Sensing Systems

This paper presents updates to the Virtual Constellation Engine (VCE), a simulator and emulator which enables modeling of sensing, computation, and communication of multi-platform remote sensing systems. Users can launch heterogeneous constellations, describe different on-board processing configurations, and simulate and verify autonomous operations. Updates in the past year include emulation of on-board computing utilizing cloud based processors, inclusion of the Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol in the communication modeling, and visualization and diagnostic tools which facilitate analysis of the distributed system. To illustrate the benefits, VCE was utilized in the development of on-board processing implementation of a new, high data rate sensor, Multispectral, Imaging, Detection, and Active Reflectance (MiDAR), for both an embedded Nvidia Tegra GPU and a Xilinx MPSoC FPGA achieving a 7.6x speedup over a desktop workstation and enabling this application for integration into a distributed sensing system.