Developing the building blocks for cognitive communications: Adaptive rates & intelligent networking

Applying data-centric and cognitive techniques in the space communications infrastructure promises, by managing and even exploiting complexity, to enhance performance and operational efficiency and to enable future science and exploration operational concepts that require flexible and adaptive communications and networking not currently available. 1 2 The paper presents a novel approach to decomposing cognitive communications into constituent parts, referred to herein as building blocks. Deconstructing cognitive communications into a set of underlying technologies or capabilities provides a manageable approach to developing the necessary underlying technologies to enable more dynamic and automated processes in the space communications architecture. To illustrate how these building blocks utilize an understanding of a system's context to drive decisions and actions, the paper presents information concerning several of the building blocks including adaptive rates, context-aware routing, cross-layer interactions, and delay/disruption tolerant networking.