Decentralized Space Surveillance: Blockchain-Based Space Domain Awareness

2025-01-12

AI Summary

To address the escalating threat of space debris and the scalability limitations, high latency, and single-point-of-failure vulnerabilities of traditional centralized Space Domain Awareness (SDA) systems, this paper proposes a decentralized SDA architecture leveraging satellite swarms and blockchain technology. We innovatively decouple the verifier and approver roles within the satellite swarm and integrate a lightweight Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol with multi-node cooperative spatiotemporal data fusion to ensure secure trajectory validation and distributed storage. Experimental evaluation on a 30-node testbed demonstrates an average system response time of 4.37 seconds, a 2.1× throughput improvement over the full-role-sharing baseline, and a 63% reduction in latency. The proposed architecture significantly enhances autonomy, robustness, and real-time performance of space domain awareness.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems
• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Vertical and domain-specific search

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of space activities and the escalating accumulation of space debris, Space Domain Awareness (SDA) has become essential for sustaining safe space operations. This paper proposes a decentralized solution using satellite swarms and blockchain, where satellites (nodes) take on the roles of verifiers and approvers to validate and store debris-tracking data securely. Our simulations show that the network achieves optimal performance with around 30 nodes, balancing throughput and response time settling at 4.37 seconds. These results suggest that large-scale networks can be effectively managed by decoupling them into smaller, autonomous swarms, each optimized for specific tasks. Furthermore, we compare the performance of the decentralized swarm architecture with that of a fully shared role model and show significant improvements in scalability and response times when roles are decoupled.

Problem

• Space Debris
• Space Safety
• Object Tracking

Innovation

• Blockchain Technology
• Space Debris Management
• Decentralized System Optimization