AiRANACULUS, a private, Massachusetts-based technology company providing early-stage research, development, prototyping and consulting services, announced it has been awarded a second NASA Small Business Innovation Research contract for the development of an advanced space communications system to support upcoming missions to the Moon and Mars.
Under the new contract, AiRANACULUS will develop a first-of-its-kind Intelligent Network Slicing and Policy-based Routing Engine solution (INSPIRE) to manage diverse traffic across shared satellite networks. The project leverages Network Slicing features in 5G networks to logically partition and securely manage multiple application services. In addition, INSPIRE will enable new levels of the policy control. Given the long transmission distances for the moon and interplanetary satellite missions, communication functions and operations currently have to be planned well in advance. The AiRANACULUS solution will use continuous assessment of the ambient RF environment to feed machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to make routing decisions without having to wait for ground-based assessment and control of anomalous situations.
Dr. Apurva N. Mody, Founder and CEO of AiRANACULUS said that the project will provide NASA a unified traffic management architecture for both space and ground communications, dramatically simplifying control of these complex networks. The self-adjusting communications network will introduce new levels of ultra-high availability and efficiency with significant benefits for commercial and military terrestrial networks in the future.
AiRANACULUS was previously awarded a NASA contract for the development of a next-generation, cognitive communications network called CLAIRE. The CLAIRE system incorporates innovative network sensing and machine learning mechanisms to autonomously detect, learn from and adapt to changes in transmission spectrum utilization to optimize mission communications.
