Design and Implemention of an Emulation Node for Space Network Protocol Testing

Abstract

This paper proposed a scheme to design and implement an embedded emulation node, which provided an approach to emulate a precision network environment for the measurement of network protocols in the space information network. The design scheme employed the Beaglebone black (BBB) board which owns the approximate hardware performance as a satellite has, ported the real-time operating system RTEMS to BBB board, and then loaded the ION-DTN on it. We established the RTEMS development environment on BBB board, and then designed and implemented the network adapter driver associated with BBB board for RTEMS. The emulation results show that the designed emulation node is stable and reliable. With the DTN protocol stack working properly on emulation node, the function and performance of the designed emulation node can meet the requirements of space network protocol tests.