Overview

The communication stack is built from independent layers, each handling a specific class of failure or transformation. These layers do not operate in isolation — their behaviors interact in ways that affect the overall system's reliability, timing, and security properties.

This section covers the cross-cutting concerns that span multiple layers. Understanding these interactions is essential for configuring the stack correctly: choosing the wrong combination of FEC strength, retransmission policy, and timeout values can degrade performance even when each layer works correctly in isolation.

• Reliability — how FEC, COP-1, and SRSPP recover from different failure classes
• Security — where SDLS sits in the pipeline and how it interacts with reliability and routing
• Time Codes — CCSDS time formats used in headers and metadata across the stack