Potentials and limitations of IEEE 802.11 for satellite swarms

In the space community, there is a strong interest in formation flying or swarm missions with small satellites. This could open the door to new exciting applications in earth observation, telecommunication or in-orbit servicing. Such missions are expected to have important benefits in terms of low system and deployment costs, distributed sensor capability or high reliability due to redundancy. In order to take advantage of a swarm configuration, a communication concept is required, which deals in a generic way with specific space environments and is able to cope with frequent topology changes. Up to now, space communication has only addressed static inter-satellite links (ISL), mainly based on proprietary protocols. In this paper, we propose to adopt well-known terrestrial communication standards. Such standards have been proven to be well conceived for a wide range of applications. WiFi is one prominent representative of such candidates which includes the ability of ad-hoc networking in order to provide decentralized and distributed wireless networks. Space specific requirements demand minor adaptions of the communication protocols. COTS components are also suitable for such protocols with minor changes. This paper studies these adaptions in depth, both in theory and by simulations and is therefore an important step towards its realization. To our knowledge, there is currently no suitable communication technology which has been adapted for swarm missions with small satellites.