Software defined radio implementation of a negotiator node testbed for federated satellite systems

In order to support the interoperability between heterogeneous missions, Federated Satellite Systems (FSS) should include flexible communications technologies supporting protocol translation among different federated spacecrafts. A spacecraft equipped with such technology is what we refer to as a federated negotiator spacecraft. A federated negotiator node acts as a middle man between spacecraft missions that would be otherwise unable to interoperate, acting as a protocol translator and enabling the opportunistic, ad-hoc exchange of resources envisioned in the FSS paradigm. This paper presents the ongoing efforts in the development of a negotiator spacecraft for federated satellite systems. These efforts include the implementation of Software-defined Radio (SDR) systems as an enabling technology for negotiator spacecraft. In particular, this work evaluates the use of commercial-off-the-shelf SDRs and GNU Radio as the technical solution to implement negotiating functions on federated spacecraft. The live signal received from ESTCube-1 is used for the demonstration of the protocol translation between SDRs, emulating different spacecraft operating at different protocols.