Resilience Through Escalation: A Graph-Based PACE Architecture for Satellite Threat Response
This addresses operational risks for satellite systems in contested space environments, but it is incremental as it adapts an existing military methodology to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of dynamic and multi-vector threats to satellite systems by introducing a resilience by design framework based on the PACE methodology, showing that lightweight fallback mechanisms can substantially improve survivability and operational continuity.
Modern satellite systems face increasing operational risks from jamming, cyberattacks, and electromagnetic disruptions in contested space environments. Traditional redundancy strategies often fall short against such dynamic and multi-vector threats. This paper introduces a resilience by design framework grounded in the PACE (Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency) methodology, originally developed for tactical communications in military operations, and adapts it to satellite systems through a layered state transition model informed by threat scoring frameworks such as CVSS, DREAD, and NASA's risk matrix. We define a dynamic resilience index to quantify system adaptability and implement three PACE variants (static, adaptive, and epsilon-greedy reward optimized) to evaluate resilience under diverse disruption scenarios. Results show that lightweight, decision aware fallback mechanisms can substantially improve survivability and operational continuity for next generation space assets.