Integrated Space Domain Awareness and Communication System

Abstract: Space has been reforming and this evolution brings new threats that, together with technological developments and malicious intent, can pose a major challenge. Space domain awareness (SDA), a new conceptual idea, has come to the forefront. It aims sensing, detection, identification and countermeasures by providing autonomy, intelligence and flexibility against potential threats in space. In this study, we first present an insightful and clear view of the new space. Secondly, we propose an integrated SDA and communication (ISDAC) system for attacker detection. We assume that the attacker has beam-steering antennas and is capable to vary attack scenarios, such as random attacks on some receiver antennas. To track random patterns and meet SDA requirements, a lightweight convolutional neural network architecture is developed. The proposed ISDAC system shows superior and robust performance under 12 different attacker configurations with a detection accuracy of over 97.8%.