Supporting On-Demand Communications for NASA’s Deep Space Network

Current scheduling of NASA’s Deep Space Network is laborious and static. The DSN is fully pre-scheduled where many users rely on a stable schedule to plan their own spacecraft activities, weeks and months in advance of execution. However, new classes of missions are emerging that may not need to be scheduled as far in advance, and may be event-driven in coming across science targets at unpredictable times. As such, a static DSN schedule may not be the best option for these types of missions. As part of an investigation into how these more autonomous missions could efficiently utilize DSN resources, we have been exploring and prototyping the infusion of a ”demand access” model into the DSN scheduling process. These users could take advantage of an on-demand mechanism to download data. In this paper, we describe a prototype of the demand access process which consists of reserving blocks of shared antenna time (demand access tracks) and utilizing special ”beacon” tracks to request access to those blocks. Furthermore, we dive into a proposed solution for how to best schedule the beacon tracks using an aggregated value function in order to minimize data latency and track starvation.