Architecture for an Intermediate-Frequency Digital Downconversion and Data Distribution Network

NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) is looking to modernize aging downlink receivers for telemetry, tracking, and radio science. It is looking to replace multiple types of custom-built, special-purpose receivers with a unified receiver architecture that can support the various downlink data types. As part of this modernization, it is desired to only digitize the data once and then distribute the data using commercial switching network technology to multiple back-end receiver processing hardware and software. The main problem to be solved is how to distribute efficiently and flexibly high-bandwidth intermediate-frequency (100 to 600 MHz) digitized signals across a signal processing center for use in the DSN.