Inter-Satellite Communications for Small Satellite Systems

Small satellite technology has opened a new era in aerospace engineering by decreasing space mission costs, without greatly reducing the performance. The concept of formation flying using small satellites is becoming popular because of their potential to perform coordinated measurements of remote sensing space missions. The current state of art in satellite communications is a one hop link between satellite and ground station. Very little work has been done on inter-satellite communications. This paper aims to design and evaluate feasible MAC and routing layer protocols for distributed small satellite networks. The possibility to implement proposed MAC and routing protocols for two different formation flying patterns are investigated. To validate the authors’ proposed system model, they use extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of the system using throughput, access delay and end-to-end delay. Inter-Satellite Communications for Small Satellite Systems