Deep-space communication links between planetary bodies are critically vulnerable to solar energetic particle (SEP) events and orbital occultations, which cause severe signal degradation and extended communication blackouts lasting several hours. Current Deep Space Network (DSN) protocols rely on reactive fault detection, incurring round-trip retransmission penalties that can exceed several hours on Mars–Earth links. This paper presents the Electromagnetic Deep-space Transmission (EMDT) system, a multi-layer communication framework designed to replace reactive fault detection with predictive mitigation for resilient interplanetary networking. EMDT integrates four complementary technical layers: (1) An Adaptive Intelligent Routing Controller (AIRC) that employs a 15-minute predictive lookahead horizon using real-time solar Kp-index forecasting to proactively reroute traffic onto optimal backup relay paths before link degradation occurs, eliminating the 5-minute reactive detection gap inherent in current DSN protocols. (2) An Adaptive Error Inference Layer (AEIL) implementing Rate-1/2 Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) belief propagation decoding that provides 6.5 dB of coding gain for in-situ error recovery, suppressing bit errors by over four orders of magnitude without requiring retransmission. (3) A Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) layer based on Bundle Protocol version 7 (BPv7, RFC 9171) that implements store-and-forward custody transfer to maintain data continuity during Mars orbital occultation periods with 120-minute orbital cycles and 10-minute contact windows. (4) An SVD-based RF eigenfingerprinting module that extracts unique hardware-intrinsic biases — carrier frequency offset, amplitude imbalance, and phase noise — from demodulated RF waveforms to authenticate authorized transmitter nodes and reject rogue spoofing attempts at the physical layer. The system is evaluated over a 720-hour (30-day) simulation window using a solar weather channel model calibrated against real NASA DONKI (Database of Notifications, Knowledge, Information) solar flare records from the May 2024 geomagnetic superstorm, the most severe event of Solar Cycle 25 reaching a planetary Kp-index of 9.0. The channel model maps Kp-index values to Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) degradation using a non-linear absorption model derived from ITU-R P.676 atmospheric attenuation recommendations, with BPSK modulation over an Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel. Simulation results demonstrate that all five design milestones exceed their respective IEEE-class performance targets: (M1) AIRC predictive routing achieves a 36.2% reduction in average packet loss over reactive baselines, exceeding the 15% design target; (M2) AEIL LDPC decoding achieves a Bit Error Rate (BER) of 4.22×10⁻⁸ at 10 dB SNR, surpassing the 1.1×10⁻⁴ target by over four orders of magnitude; (M3) DTN BPv7 integration achieves a Bundle Delivery Ratio (BDR) of 39.9% under simulated Mars–Earth occultation, compared to 7.6% for standard TCP/IP routing; (M4) RF eigenfingerprinting achieves 99.3% physical-layer authentication accuracy at 5 dB SNR across 1,000 trials with 10 authorized devices; (M5) The full EMDT pipeline achieves a 70.8% aggregate reduction in retransmission delay, exceeding the 60% design target. The complete simulation framework, including all Python source code, NASA DONKI data integration, and reproducibility artifacts, is publicly available at https://github.com/Hariharan-1828/EMDT for independent verification and replication.
Hariharan M (Wed,) studied this question.