Sergi Aliaga

Sergi Aliaga, Ahmad Masihi, Vitaly Petrov et al.

As the commercial space economy expands, existing ground-based infrastructure faces severe bottlenecks in supporting the data-intensive continuous connectivity needs of next-generation "space users," including CubeSats, space data centers, and more. Even when utilizing existing Ku-band ground relay networks, the contact time with a CubeSat at low-Earth orbit (LEO) is often still limited to minutes per day only. This paper analyzes an alternative system design that leverages emerging high-rate millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sub-terahertz (sub-THz) inter-satellite links to build a high-throughput and high-availability satellite-based relay backbone for space vehicles. To evaluate this concept, we develop a comprehensive mathematical framework that jointly incorporates complex time-variant orbital dynamics and mmWave/sub-THz link characteristics. We then derive the key performance indicators, including contact probability, channel capacity, and energy efficiency. The numerical results, cross-verified by computer simulations, demonstrate that such systems can provide improvements of up to several orders of magnitude compared to existing networks of ground stations. Notably, we identify a fundamental bound on download capacity and show that continuous 24/7 connectivity becomes achievable with only ten LEO relay satellites. These findings establish mmWave and sub-THz satellite relay networks as a promising, scalable, and energy-efficient solution, thus unlocking improved connectivity with various space vehicles of tomorrow.

Eduardo Baena, Paolo Testolina, Michele Polese et al.

Lunar surface operations impose stringent requirements on wireless communication systems, including autonomy, robustness to disruption, and the ability to adapt to environmental and mission-driven context. While Space-O-RAN provides a distributed orchestration model aligned with 3GPP standards, its decision logic is limited to static policies and lacks semantic integration. We propose a novel extension incorporating a semantic agentic layer enabled by the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication protocols, allowing context-aware decision making across real-time, near-real-time, and non-real-time control layers. Distributed cognitive agents deployed in rovers, landers, and lunar base stations implement wireless-aware coordination strategies, including delay-adaptive reasoning and bandwidth-aware semantic compression, while interacting with multiple MCP servers to reason over telemetry, locomotion planning, and mission constraints.