Research on wireless networking mode for the distributed satellite communication system

Numerous space exploration missions for Earth System Monitoring need distributed small satellites to be deployed in the low Earth orbit according to a specific position, posture, which realize large-scale synchronous collection of multipoint data to obtain better results. These satellites flying in close formations would collaboratively achieve the mission aims at lower costs and with enhanced reliability compared to larger single platform missions. One of the key technologies to the success of such missions is the reliable inter-satellite links (ISLs). Although many protocols are designed to apply in the inter-satellite communication, they are for a specific communication layer and there has been little work done in the whole protocol stack design. To improve the performance of the distributed satellite communication (DSC) system, a network architecture is therefore proposed to supports satellite communication with the multi-hop ad hoc paradigm. The architecture incorporates the enhanced IEEE 802.11 protocol and a proactive routing protocol with the timely formation status. In contrast to the huge amount of work on IEEE 802.11 for ISLs, there are few studies on the relationship between bit error rate in the physical layer and packet size in the application layer. This leads us to establish a whole network in the NS3 simulator which supports wireless communication natively. In this paper we compare two models of distributed satellite formations which provide the metrics matrix of the routes in the DSC system. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed network architecture for the distributed satellite communication system. ©, 2015, Binary Information Press. All right reserved.