Resilient Spectrum Scheduling for Colocated Space Networks

Abstract

Ground station handovers across Earth based Deep Space Network (DSN) terminals incur carrier lock reacquisition delays of 4 to 8 minutes per event, introducing periodic telemetry blackouts during cislunar flights. We address this limitation by formulating temporal handover sequences as perfect interval conflict graphs. For single spacecraft trajectories, we establish that adding a single reserve channel ($k=4$) enables static offline channel preallocation, eliminating spacecraft transponder retuning during station switches. To sustain link availability under unexpected atmospheric fades or station outages, we construct a Robust Space Communication Graph (R-SCG) model, demonstrating that four channels suffice to maintain uninterrupted coverage under single node failure conditions. For unmodeled link disruptions, we implement a distributed local recoloring scheme with $O(1)$ amortized complexity, augmented by Random Forest state classification for predictive channel reassignment. Furthermore, for colocated spacecraft clusters, we show that the joint ground space conflict graph retains chordality, bounding the required spectrum to $3+c$ channels for $c$ concurrent assets. A 10 day orbital simulation demonstrates that static channel preassignment recovers up to 2.7~hours of telemetry throughput relative to conventional reactive handover schemes.