Abstract: The probes on the back of the moon must rely on lunar relay satellite for communication. Lunar relay tasks include realtime tasks such as telecontrol and telemetry, and delaytolerant tasks such as data transmission tasks. When the amount of data that the probe is waiting to transmit exceeds the probe′s storage capacity, the delaytolerant task may fail due to the insufficient local storage resources and the limited communication links of relay satellite, which will cause data loss. Therefore, it is necessary to design a reasonable lunar relay task scheduling strategy to improve the resource utilization of lunar relay satellite and reduce data loss.  The task scheduling of lunar relay satellite problem was investigated. A lunar relay satellite task scheduling model was established to minimize the data loss and a scheduling algorithm based on discrete firework algorithm (DFWA) was designed to solve this model. Simulation results show that our algorithm performs better than Genetic algorithm (GA) in the terms of data loss.

Key words: lunar relay satellite, task scheduling, constraint satisfaction model, firework algorithm, storage constraints