Advancing Micro–Nano-Satellite Operations: A Page-Table-Driven Software Architecture for Enhanced On-Board Management

Micro–nano-satellites typically necessitate on-board management software (OBMSW) to enhance the mission autonomy, given the limited telecommand uplink and telemetry downlink capabilities. However, existing OBMSW are generally difficult to reconfigure due to their rigid architecture and programming. To improve the operability and maintainability of OBMSW, this paper proposes a page-table-driven software architecture (PTDSA) relying on an encoder and an engine. Specifically, the encoder encapsulates logical rules and the command sequence via code-value page tables (CVPTs), and the engine comprises corresponding interpreter and executor, which support decoding the logical rules within CVPTs, performing data parsing and logical analysis, and executing the control sequence. As a plug-in module, PTDSA provides OBMSW various code-value data to perform different tasks, improving the robustness and reusability of OBMSW. Thanks to page tables, PTDSA could achieve dynamic updates without service interruption and avoid the CPU occupation associated with one-shot tasks. Also, three experimental cases on a custom-developed on-board computer platform are provided to validate the successful governance of PTDSA on OBMSW.