Reactive Routing: Harnessing Advanced Software Modems

Reactive Routing is an innovation in space networking by which unplanned changes in link performance are detected and analyzed, enabling automatic and immediate adjustments to the ldquo;contact plansrdquo; on which route computation in delay-tolerant networking (DTN) is based. These changes in contact planning will result in route revisions that will accurately reallocate traffic load to the revised transmission opportunities, improving network performance while reducing operations costs. Reactive Routing is only the first step toward the deployment of instrumented networks that monitor and examine their own operational experience and use the resulting insights to configure themselves for optimality. A key element of that future architecture will be software-defined radios that will support multiple wave form options, error correcting code options, and security features, and will interact with their networks to optimize spectrum use; antenna evolution will add beam steering, nulling, and frequency reconfiguration capabilities. These advanced software modems (ASMs) will incorporate control systems that manage the range of their capabilities to support network communication and science. Reactive Routing is the beginning of our initiative to bring the power of ASMs to networks built on the DTN Bundle Protocol (RFC 9171), culminating in autonomous cognitive networks that require little or no routine human management.