Space Communication and BATS Codes: A Marriage Made in Heaven

Innovative communication technologies are in great demand in the national space development program. In this paper, space communication with network coding is studied, with the aim of exploring the feasibility and potential of network coding for future space communication. The characteristics of space communication are first discussed, and an overview of different coding based methods is given. As a potentially applicable technology, network coding based Batched Sparse (BATS) code is presented to address the packet loss problem in multi-hop relay networks. In particular, a BATS code prototype is designed and implemented, and the experiment results demonstrate the advantages of BATS codes over alternative technologies. Finally, the prospect of deployment of BATS codes in space communication is discussed.