A Virtual Ground Station Based on Distributed Components for Satellite Communications

Communication with Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites requires the set up of a ground station which is a complex and costly installation. Moreover, a LEO satellite is accessible only during certain time slots from a given ground station. In other words, access to LEO satellites is on an intermittent basis and is constrained by the availability of ground stations. The work presented in this paper aims at augmenting the accessibility to the services offered by LEO satellites. We have devised a concept of virtual ground station available over the Internet. A virtual ground station can be used by any client with a computer attached to the Internet which augments the degree of accessibility. Besides, a virtual ground station and its clients don't have to be collocated. A client can access a satellite as long as a remote virtual ground station has access to it. As long as there are several virtual ground stations distributed at several locations, this architecture augments the degree of accessibility to satellites. The design of the virtual ground station is based on CORBA distributed components. The virtual ground station has been developed using an application framework we have created, hence reducing the amount of programming required to obtain it. Moreover, we have developed a client satellite tracking software that uses our virtual ground station. In this paper, we review the design and implementation of our virtual ground station concept. We also present the companion client satellite tracking software that we have developed.