From LTE-A to LTE-M: A futuristic convergence between terrestrial and martian mobile communications

In these last years, the efforts spent by national and international Space agencies to promote the Mars exploration configure a true rush, whose final goal should be a manned mission, with the active participation of human personnel in-situ. In this paper, we are dealing with the communication aspects of Martian missions. The communication tasks of a Space mission are twofold: first the different unmanned (and, in the near future, manned) exploration entities should exchange information among themselves; then, the collected and processed data should be sent to Earth. For the inter-planetary connection, satellites will provide the necessary long-haul. For the Martian planetary segment, the state-of-the-art solutions are mainly based on terrestrial WLAN and/or WSN standards, in order to make different sensors to communicate in short range. Our solution is based on the deployment of a Martian wireless network infrastructure based on LTE. LTE on Mars (namely: LTE-M) would provide a robust and flexible communication infrastructure, characterized by large bandwidth availability for rover and lander communications, suitable to be exploited also for efficient human-to-human data exchange when manned missions will be planned. The adaptability of terrestrial LTE uplink and downlink transmission has been tested by simulating the RF Martian environment, with the most significant propagation impairments. The achieved results will be focused on providing some guidelines for future LTE-M actual deployment.