Traffic Modeling for Deep Space Network in the Human Mars Exploration Era

In this article we describe the analysis and simulation effort of the end-to-end traffic flow for the Deep Space Network (DSN) in the Human Exploration Era, when DSN will provide communication and navigation services for human missions to distant celestial objects like the Moon, asteroids, and Mars. Using the network traffic derived for the 30-day period within July/August 2039 from the Space Communications Mission Model (SCMM), we simulate the bandwidths of the ground links and the buffer profiles of the network nodes. We also use a 2-state Markov scheme that models the store-and-forward mechanism that regulates the ground network traffic. The network traffic modeling and simulation generates ground bandwidth and buffer statistics, which in turn are used to formulate the future DSN ground network bandwidth and storage requirements.