Satellite telecom software dynamic upgrade with QoS continuity

To remain competitive with terrestrial systems, new generation satellite systems constantly have to offer better services. But, once they are launched, rapid networking and protocol evolutions could make the satellite system services less competitive. Therefore, embedded telecom services should be upgraded periodically. The paper addresses the QoS continuity of users' services during the dynamic reconfiguration of software embedded telecommunication functionalities. First, we propose a dynamic reconfiguration process specialized to spatial environment. We show that this process cannot guarantee the QoS continuity of user telecommunication functionalities. Second, we propose to enhance the proposed dynamic reconfiguration process with an a priori formal validation step whose purpose is to formally prove that intrinsic and extrinsic embedded software constraints are respected during the dynamic reconfiguration. We evaluate our approach on embedded software in charge of dynamic multiplexing onboard a telecommunication satellite.