The Petite Amateur Naval Satellite (PANSAT) is an operational communications microsatellite designed at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). PANSAT's communications software was intended to be developed after orbital insertion and transmitted to the satellite. The Sockets Application Programming Interface (API) developed at the University of California, Berkeley is the de facto standard API for network applications. It provides a strong and flexible platform on which to develop a wide variety of programs. It accelerates the development of new applications by providing a standard set of features and isolating the program from the underlying networking mechanisms. This thesis studied the viability of implementing of a Sockets API for PANSAT based on the Berkeley Sockets. PANSAT's Sockets API was built on BekTek's spacecraft Operating System (SCOS). Because SCOS source code was not available, network protocols had to be implemented in user mode. SCOS is optimized for multiple small tasks, not the complex processes required for Internet programming. Because of SCOS' limitations in memory management, the development of this protocol stack and API was not successful. SCOS does not have the features required for an implementation like this.
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