STDMA for Inter-satellite Communication in Low Earth Orbit

Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering book series (LNEE, volume 386)

Abstract

Distributed small satellites flying in close formations are deployed in the low Earth orbit for Earth observation (EO) missions owing to their unique ability to increase observation sampling in spatial, spectral, angular, and temporal dimensions simultaneously. All these missions require inter-satellite links (ISLs) with guaranteed performance to track and maintain the satellites in a desired geometric configuration. The data exchanged should then be arrived timely in order to control the inter-satellite distance collaboratively. Although many protocols are developed to apply in different communication layer, there has been little work done in self-organizing time division multiple access (STDMA) in data link layer for the inter-satellite communication.This paper addresses an adaption of STDMA in order to reduce the overall development costs of novel space missions. Besides, STDMA has been simulated in a mesh formation scenario with periodic broadcast packets compared to Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA). Finally, simulation results show that STDMA has a higher packet reception probability in the scenario and thereby a better reliability.

Keywords

Satellite communication STDMA LEO Wireless network 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Jionghui Li of NSSC, CAS and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that improved the presentation of this paper.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of SciencesBeijingChina
  2. 2.University of Chinese Academy of SciencesBeijingChina

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