Orchestrating the next generation of aerospace networks
What is spacetime?
history and achievements
TECHNOLOGY
SPATIAL SDN
NETWORKS THAT ANTICIPATE
ALL DOMAIN
RESILIENCE AND RAPID RECONSTITUTION
integration
Integrate, with open apis
Partnership
partner with us
Add real hardware to the Spacetime environment as prototypes and final systems become available to incrementally grow into a production-ready instance. Aalyria can host on your preferred infrastructure provider and classification level, and provides 24x7x365 carrier-grade support to keep your network operational at the highest level of reliability.
And after your production deployment, we will continue to future proof your network with continuous feature updates and the ability, when you’re ready, to coordinate resource sharing and interconnections with partners and allied networks – on your terms.
FAQ
Spacetime is a new twist on a Software Defined Network controller. Whereas contemporary SDN controllers can only orchestrate the layer 3 network control plane (routing), Spacetime is capable of orchestrating the present and scheduled network control plane across layer 1 (physical link topology), layer 2 lower MAC (transceiver/air interface configuration), and layer 3 (routing). We refer to this concept as Temporospatial SDN in academic literature; it reflects the fact that the controller’s information base must contain the ability to propagate the future motion of the physical platforms in order to model the candidate wireless link topology, to orchestrate that topology, and to compute routing paths across space and time.
In addition to these layer 1-3 control plane functions, Spacetime is also capable of monitoring network telemetry (like signal quality and traffic congestion) for the purposes of network resource optimization. It also exposes key metrics (like present and forecast fulfillment of service level agreements, comparisons of signal quality vs digital twin estimates, etc.) to facilitate automated alerting by external incident response and management systems.
Aalyria’s primary target customers for Spacetime are those commercial and public sector organizations charged with operating communications network infrastructure – especially ones with mesh networks that incorporate steerable directional wireless communications. These include commercial and military satellite network operators, earth observation and intelligence community satellite constellation operators, HAPS and airborne mesh network operators, maritime mesh network operators, terrestrial network operators employing millimeter wave and optical technology in integrated access and backhaul networks, and civil space exploration agencies.
However, the network effect of Spacetime and the Federation model provides secondary benefits to organizations and enterprises even when they do not have any such infrastructure under their control. See “What if some/all of the satellite payloads are out of our control?” below.
An instance of Spacetime can incorporate networks outside your control, supports automated network switching, and can even support the automated brokering of dynamic interconnections with and across these networks – while simultaneously performing the complete control and optimization of any assets you fully control. Each instance can mix and match assets and networks across the following tiers, which are listed and described in increasing order of capability afforded to the customer:
(1) Basic: Like contemporary SD-WAN solutions, Spacetime can monitor key performance metrics for network services that transit networks outside of your control and reactively switch networks when necessary. It does not need any information for this basic tier.
(2) Enhanced: By adding to Spacetime any available information about the satellite orbits, transmitter and receiver chains, and antenna gain patterns, Spacetime can predict impacts caused by weather, terrain obstructions, potential jamming threats, and other disruptions – proactively switching connections for seamless continuity. It can also proactively forecast disruptions to mission / customer end-to-end service requirements before they even occur.
(3) Federation: Buyers of satellite capacity can compel commercial satellite operators to add support for the open-source Federation API, even if they aren’t using Spacetime to orchestrate their networks. A number of the largest commercial satellite network operators have already selected Spacetime to orchestrate their production networks, which natively supports the Federation API. When these networks choose to share information with your network via these open APIs, Spacetime can dynamically broker connections across their networks in real-time, offering unparalleled flexibility and responsiveness.
(4) FullControl: For first party network infrastructure, Spacetime can directly orchestrate everything – satellites, ground stations, user terminals, etc. – for complete control and optimization.
Contemporary SD-WAN solutions ignore that the physical wireless links and paths across the underlying networks are constantly changing. In reality, the commercial satellite providers have provisioned their network around certain expectations about the geographic locations and statistical distribution of demand – all based on the static procurement contracts and service level agreements they’ve signed with their customers. These expectations determine the operators’ static schedule of beam handovers, management of satellite payload resources, and paths across their network. SD-WAN solutions only attempt to sense the health and current performance of these paths and automate switching between commercial providers.
This approach has its limitations. To illustrate them, consider a LEO constellation like SpaceX Starlink/Starshield configured to provide services to their static prediction of the statistical demand from a population of user terminals registered in known locations (labeled UT in the diagram below).
In this example, SpaceX has configured their network expecting some statistical demand from US DoD customer terminals in configured geographies. But, what if a US DoD customer terminal has a sudden mission requirement to log in from an unexpected cell / geography – one where SpaceX has not configured their network to expect a log-in? Or what if it’s in an expected location; but, the customer has a mission constraint that requires transit through a certain POP to a private network instead of the Internet? Or what if the US DoD mission requirements exceed the link layer capacity of the spectrum resources assigned to the cells – or the available capacity through ISLs and GWs, given competing flows? SD-WAN cannot even attempt to solve such problems.
Supporting these requirements requires the SATCOM provider to modify the way they are orchestrating their network. Until now, typical turnaround times for a customer to ask a SATCOM provider to support such needs (for example, to provision a new beam in a new geography) would typically involve a human <> human request between the customer <> provider and then, once understood and approved, a human-in-the-loop network operations task to reconfigure the provider network. This would take hours or days. Those are not tactically responsive timeframes.
In order to reduce this timeframe to mere seconds, three things are needed:
- The SATCOM provider needs access to a technology capable of intent-driven, automated orchestration of the network topology, radio resource optimization, and routing within seconds of new requests.
- The customer network (in this example, the US DoD) needs to compel the provider to implement open APIs that expose the candidate points of interconnection (ingress) and candidate reachable destinations (egress) and accept requests for on-demand network transit. Note that the provider does not need to expose anything about the inner workings of their network.
- The customer network (again, in this example, the US DoD) needs access to a technology capable of modeling the time periods when interconnection with the provider’s ingress points is possible. For wired interconnections, this is trivial. It’s also fairly straightforward for anyone to build software to model the time periods when a government-managed terminal has an unobstructed field of view of provider satellites. For interconnections from and between airborne terminals, maritime terminals, and in-space interconnections (e.g., between SDA PWSA and commercial LEO across SDA-compliant optical communication terminals), this is non-trivial.
Spacetime fulfills all three of these needs.