Analysis of communication strategies for earth observation satellite constellations

Abstract

Earth observation satellite constellations are arising as a new paradigm with important advantages in comparison with traditional monolithic systems. In particular, the concept of Segmented Architecture proposes to transform these constellations into a distributed and connected system in order to exploit resource sharing. However, this imposes severe technological challenges such as packetized space networking communications. In general, and due to the limited availability of data transmission opportunities, these communications can be modeled as delay and disruption tolerant networks (DTN). In this article, we propose to evaluate a particular case study of several flight-formation satellites intended for the observation of the Earth. To this end, we consider both the availability of Earth-to-space links and their combination with cooperative inter-satellite links. In the latter, different routing schemes such as Contact Graph Routing (CGR) and its extension Multi-Graph CGR (MG-CGR) are analyzed and compared.