A Knowledge-Centric Communication For Autonomous Cislunar Networks

Abstract

Future lunar infrastructure requires communication as a persistent service rather than a mission specific capability. Communication, digital twin, and artificial intelligence (AI) research have advanced autonomy independently while largely assuming that system state can eventually be reconciled with ground truth. Cislunar communication violates this assumption because propagation delay is fundamentally limited by the speed of light, visibility is governed by orbital geometry, and autonomous decisions often precede confirming observations. Here we introduce a knowledge-centric communication framework in which a digital twin continuously integrates delayed observations, communication physics, learned models, uncertainty quantification, and mission objectives into an evolving Operational Knowledge State. To quantify what is known, how uncertain it remains, and how current it is, we define two quantities over the fused Bayesian belief maintained for each communication link: \emph{Knowledge Entropy}, the differential entropy of the posterior belief, and \emph{Knowledge Freshness}, which generalizes Age of Information (AoI) from a single information stream to the temporal validity of the fused Operational Knowledge State. We prove that distributed knowledge fusion systematically improves operational knowledge by reducing uncertainty and demonstrate its importance for mission success through simulations and comparisons with flight data from the Longjiang-2 lunar micro-satellite.