Abstract
Extending the internet of things (IoT) networks to remote areas under extreme conditions or for serving sometimes unpredictable mobile applications has increased the need for satellite technology to provide effective connectivity. However, existent medium access control (MAC) protocols deployed in commercial satellite networks were not designed to offer scalable solutions for the increasing number of devices predicted for IoT in the near future, nor do they consider other specific IoT characteristics. In particular, CubeSats—a low-cost solution for space technology—have the potential to become a wireless access network for the IoT, if additional requirements, including simplicity and low demands in processing, storage, and energy consumption are incorporated into MAC protocol design for satellite IoT systems. Here we review MAC protocols employed or proposed for satellite systems and evaluate their performance considering the IoT scenario along with the trend of using CubeSats for IoT connectivity. Criteria include channel load, throughput, energy efficiency, and complexity. We have found that Aloha-based protocols and interference cancellation-based protocols stand out on some of the performance metrics. However, the tradeoffs among communications performance, energy consumption, and complexity require improvements in future designs, for which we identify specific challenges and open research areas for MAC protocols deployed with next low-cost nanosatellite IoT systems.
Highlights
From the beginnings of space exploration, satellites were large objects that took years to construct and cost billions of dollars for a single unit
The contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) we review medium access control (MAC) protocols employed or proposed for satellite systems from a novel viewpoint that considers the restricted characteristics of CubeSat technology for wireless communications together with the particular requirements of internet of things (IoT)
The protocols are placed according to: (1) their fulfillment of IoT-related requirements such as the scalability, which relates to the communications performance when serving networks composed of a large number of nodes, the topology dependency; and the energy efficiency; and (2) their adaptation to the constraints of nanosatellite technology, in which case we evaluate their implementation complexity
Summary
From the beginnings of space exploration, satellites were large objects that took years to construct and cost billions of dollars for a single unit. Commercial satellite companies like Iridium, Intelsat, O3b, and others offer a portfolio of products, including voice services, broadband, and sensor data collection, with extensive coverage of the Earth’s surface. Terrestrial technologies do not fully cover the Earth’s surface yet. It is in such a scenario that satellite technology seems to offer the critical solution to the problem of global connectivity. MAC layer groups a set of protocols and mechanisms in order to distribute the resources for the nodes to make an effective (and efficient) use of the communications channel. The priority is set to the performance concerning data transmission rate, for which the normalized offered load and the normalized throughput are measured.
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