Lightweight service architectures for space missions

Service architectures provide mechanisms for transactions and for the aggregation and composition of services, including monitoring and self-actuation within the architecture. In this paper we present an architecture appropriate for the computationally limited environment of space missions. We address the ever-increasing time and cost of developing and operating the information systems that space missions embody through the composition of services in this lightweight architecture. A lightweight, service-oriented architecture (SOA) can simplify system design and can support advanced computing concepts such as autonomic logistics and autonomic computing (Hartman, 2004). The unifying idea in a light weight service architecture (LWSA) is to abstract away idiosyncrasies of development, connection and use. Computational nodes in such an architecture are loosely coupled and inherit the advantages associated with networks in general including fault tolerance, reusability, scalability, performance and cost