Building Cellular Connectivity on Mars: A Feasibility Study

The recent literature has proposed a visionary and potentially disruptive idea, i.e. to deploy some sort of cellular networking infrastructure on Mars, based on terrestrial LTE principles. So far, the Martian communications are unidirectional. Data acquired by the surface sensors, mounted on landers and rovers, are sent to the Earth by means of low-rate direct connections, based on IEEE 802.15.4 standard, or using satellite-based relaying. Such kind of approaches does not consider the possibility of proactive cooperation between the different exploration vehicles present on Mars (landers, rovers, orbiters), enabling on-site data exchange and distributed information processing. Moreover, in the future perspective of manned missions, astronauts could profitably exploit the presence of networked connectivity to communicate among themselves and/or to exchange data with the processing devices already present on the Red Planet. Another key point of LTE is the support of mobility, totally unsupported by current wireless infrastructures operating on Mars surface. In this paper, we aim at improving some preliminary assessments concerning the efficient design of an LTE-based radio access interface that should operate on Mars. Link performance of standard LTE configuration - based on SC-FDMA with Localized FDMA (L-FDMA) for the uplink and OFDMA for the downlink - will be analyzed by means of in-lab simulations for two different Martian sites (Gusev 1 and Gusev 3) and two different link distances (100 m and 1 Km respectively). Moreover, the performance of non-standard multiple access strategies like Interleaved-FDMA (I-FDMA) will be assessed for the uplink in the Martian scenarios. Link budget and Quality-of-Service (QoS) analysis that concludes the paper will discuss in details the issue of the adaptability of terrestrial LTE to the Martian propagation environment. The main outcome of the proposed analysis is that LTE, as deployed on the Earth, can support high capacity in short-range cells with some modest upgrading (e.g. the use of I-FDMA for the uplink instead of L-FDMA), while, for long range transmission, the mobile radio interface should be substantially redesigned, especially for what concerns the RF section.