Abstract
Presently, the Earth Observation community is demanding applications that provide low latency and high downlink capabilities. An increase in downlink contacts becomes essential to meet these new requirements. The Federated Satellite Systems concept addresses this demand by promoting satellite collaborations to share unused downlink opportunities. These collaborations are established opportunistically and temporarily, posing multiple technology challenges to be implemented in-orbit. This work contributes to the definition of the Federation Deployment Control Protocol which formalizes a mechanism to fairly establish and manage these collaborations by employing a negotiation process between the satellites. Moreover, this manuscript presents the results of a validation campaign of this protocol with three stratospheric balloons. In summary, more than 27 federations with 63.0% of throughput were established during the field campaign. Some of these federations were used to download data to the ground, and others were established to balance data storage between balloons. These federations allowed also the extension of the coverage of a ground station with a federation that relayed data through a balloon, and the achievement of a hybrid scenario with one balloon forwarding data from a ground device. The results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is functional and ready to be embedded in a CubeSat mission.
Highlights
New key enabling technologies have precluded the emergence of novel space-based applications that can satisfy current environmental, and socio-economic demands
The environmental, and socio-economic demands are requesting the development of new satellite applications that provides accurate, and near-real-time information
The Internet of Satellites (IoSat) paradigm aims at addressing this situation by promoting the establishment of temporal networks between satellites following the opportunistic nature of the federations
Summary
New key enabling technologies have precluded the emergence of novel space-based applications that can satisfy current environmental, and socio-economic demands. The Horizon 2020 Operational Network of Individual Observation Nodes (ONION). Project [1] identified the needs of the Earth Observation (EO) community to define the evolution of the EU Copernicus system in the 2020–2030 time frame. Applications to monitor the marine weather forecast, and marine fishery pressure are the most demanded ones to cover the Arctic changes, followed by the hydric stress monitoring (i.e., soil moisture) as a proxy of desertification, or crop yield. The increase of climate disasters has accentuated the need for continuous monitoring and prediction [2]. As pointed out in [3], these applications can only be achieved with low latency and submetric spatial resolution observations.
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