Abstract
Earth Observation applications are demanding higher spatial resolution and shorter revisit times than existing systems, which can be met by ad-hoc constellations of Federated Satellite Systems. These systems are distributed satellite architectures which rely on the collaboration between satellites that share unused resources, such as memory storage, computing capabilities, or downlink opportunities. In the same context, the Internet of Satellites paradigm expands the federation concept to a multi-hop scenario, without predefining a particular satellite system architecture, and deploying temporal satellite networks. The basis of both concepts is the offer of unused satellite resources as services. Therefore, it is necessary that satellites notify their availability to the other satellites that compose the system. This work presents a novel Opportunistic Service Availability Dissemination Protocol, which allows a satellite to publish an available service to be consumed by others. Details of the protocol behavior, and packet formats are presented as part of the protocol definition. The protocol has been verified in a realistic scenario composed of Earth Observation satellites, and the Telesat mega-constellation as network backbone. The achieved results demonstrate the benefits of using a protocol as the proposed one, which in some cases even doubles the amount of data that can be downloaded. To the best of our knowledge, this proposal is the first protocol that allows deploying opportunistic services for Federated Satellite Systems.
Highlights
Nowadays, novel space applications have emerged to satisfy current environmental, socio-economic, and geo-political demands
The Opportunistic Service Availability Dissemination Protocol (OSADP) behavior and performance is evaluated with the execution of the previous scenario
This scenario is executed during a simulated day (i.e. 86400 seconds), and different parameters related to satellite-to-satellite communications are configured
Summary
Novel space applications have emerged to satisfy current environmental, socio-economic, and geo-political demands. The Horizon 2020 Operational Network of Individual Observation Nodes (ONION) project [1] identified the needs of the Earth Observation (EO) community. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Mohammad Tariqul Islam. Cally, applications to monitor marine weather forecast, and marine fishery pressure are the most demanded ones to cover Arctic changes, followed by hydric stress monitoring (i.e. soil moisture) as a proxy of desertification, and crop yield, among other effects. The increase of climate disasters have accentuated the need of a continuous monitoring and an accurate prediction mechanism [2]. As pointed out in [3], these applications can only be achieved with low latency and sub-metric spatial resolution observations.
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