The Cubesat Space Protocol

Cubesat Space Protocol (CSP) is a small protocol stack written in C. CSP is designed to ease communication between distributed embedded systems in smaller networks, such as Cubesats. The design follows the TCP/IP model and includes a transport protocol, a routing protocol and several MAC-layer interfaces. The core of libcsp includes a router, a connection oriented socket API and message/connection pools.

The protocol is based on an very lightweight header containing both transport and network-layer information. Its implementation is designed for, but not limited to, embedded systems with very limited CPU and memory resources. The implementation is written in GNU C and is currently ported to run on FreeRTOS, Zephyr and Linux (POSIX).

The idea is to give sub-system developers of cubesats the same features of a TCP/IP stack, but without adding the huge overhead of the IP header. The small footprint and simple implementation allows a small 8-bit system to be fully connected on the network. This allows all subsystems to provide their services on the same network level, without any master node required. Using a service oriented architecture has several advantages compared to the traditional mater/slave topology used on many cubesats.

• Standardised network protocol: All subsystems can communicate with eachother (multi-master)

• Service loose coupling: Services maintain a relationship that minimizes dependencies between subsystems

• Service abstraction: Beyond descriptions in the service contract, services hide logic from the outside world

• Service reusability: Logic is divided into services with the intention of promoting reuse.

• Service autonomy: Services have control over the logic they encapsulate.

• Service Redundancy: Easily add redundant services to the bus

• Reduces single point of failure: The complexity is moved from a single master node to several well defined services on the network

The implementation of libcsp is written with simplicity in mind, but it’s compile time configuration allows it to have some rather advanced features as well.