Design and Implementation of a Reliable Transport Layer Protocol for NUTS

Abstract

The NTNU Test Satellite (NUTS) is a double CubeSat developed mainly by students and volunteers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). One of the main goals of the NUTS mission is to establish a communication channel between the satellite and a ground station, enabling collection of data from the satellites sensors, and receiving pictures of the earth taken from the satellites camera.

The satellite is expected to be launched into low earth orbit, where the presence of cosmic radiation is known to cause erroneous behavior in electronic hardware. This generates a demand for reliability in the communication network, using redundant techniques for error detection and correction.

This thesis aims to improve the NUTS communication network by proposing a design and implementation of a reliable transport layer protocol. The protocol, named NUTS reliable protocol (NRP), features segmentation of large payloads, error detection, and error correction through retransmission of corrupt data. NRP was implemented for the NUTS software repository, with a simple API to facilitate further software development within NUTS.

The protocol has been tested and the results have been discussed, concluding a successful design and implementation of a transport layer protocol for the NUTS CubeSat mission. However, further testing is advised to maximise the protocols performance in the NUTS network.