A distributed emulator for interplanetary remote sensing

Monitoring systems based on wireless sensor networks are now becoming a reality, and their use in remote planets monitoring applications to support future space explorations has also been envisioned. These kinds of applications introduce new issues related to the communication between the remotely deployed wireless sensor network and the Earth station due to the specific constraints and traffic generated by the sensor network and to the long delays and errors introduced by the interplanetary links. In this paper we introduce an emulator for interplanetary remote sensing which in being developed in the framework of the EU SatNEx project, and we present some preliminary results on the use of TCP and DTN in the interplanetary links.