Earth-Moon scenario

Earth-Moon Communication and ROVER Teleoperation Via 5G-NR

The Earth-Moon scenario will focus on evaluating and emulating different implementations of lunar rover control and data collection through different scenarios such as direct communication between Earth and a lunar lander, communications via a lunar relay satellit, and a Moon-orbiting (Low Lunar Orbit: LLO) satellite constellation connectivity to many rovers using 5G-SDR devices. Different mobile-communication equipment options will be evaluated for the lunar rovers (small VSATs, low-power omnidirectional antennas, satellite Internet-of-Things (IoT), etc.) by using SDR platforms. The encapsulation of Robot Operating System (ROS) commands in the MAC/Link/PHY layer will also be investigated. More advanced approaches such as reinforcement learning and deep learning techniques for remote control will be evaluated in a second stage as a means to provide safer, trustworthy and efficient remote control of the lunar rover.

LLO Demonstration

^{Earth-Moon Communication and ROVER Teleoperation Via 5G-NR.}

The video illustrates a regenerative low-lunar orbit (LLO) sattelite that is oriting the lunar surface with an altitude of 100KM. On earth, we have a control mission room, so called concurrent design facility (CDF) where it host the 3GPP core network and and the teleoperator that monitor, and control the rover.

^{Earth-Moon Communication and ROVER Teleoperation Via 5G-NR.}

tip

Demonstration for OAI Fall 2022 OpenAirInterface North American Workshop hosted by Qualcomm in San Diego on November 8th and 9th, 2022.

^{Earth-Moon Communication and ROVER Teleoperation Via 5G-NR.}

Objective

The objective of this demo is to evaluate the existing terrestrial technologies such as 4G/5G-NR for their suitability for Moon exploration scenarios. In the following architecture, we Emulate a low-lunar orbit (LLO) mission. In this mission we experiment two kind of delays:

• Earth-Moon communication delay that is impacting the SRI link [emulated using the kernel]
• Propagation delay on the nr-Uu interface [emulated using FPGA]

References

References and resources for more information:¹, ², ³, ⁴.

---

1. Kodheli, Oltjon, Abdelrahman Astro, Jorge Querol, Mohammad Gholamian, Sumit Kumar, Nicola Maturo, and Symeon Chatzinotas. “Random Access Procedure over Non-Terrestrial Networks: From Theory to Practice.” IEEE Access 9 (2021): 109130–43. https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2021.3101291. .↩
2. Kodheli, Oltjon, Jorge Querol, Abdelrahman Astro, Sofia Coloma, Loveneesh Rana, Zhanna Bokal, Sumit Kumar, et al. “5G Space Communications Lab: Reaching New Heights.” 2022 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS), 2022. https://doi.org/10.1109/dcoss54816.2022.00063. ↩
3. https://gitlab.eurecom.fr/oai/openairinterface5g/-/tree/SnT-enb-ntn-rel-1.0↩
4. “ESA's 5G/6G Hub Used to Simulate Lunar Connection.” ESA. Accessed November 7, 2022. https://www.esa.int/Applications/Telecommunications_Integrated_Applications/ESA_s_5G_6G_Hub_used_to_simulate_lunar_connection.↩