Towards a Disaster Response System Based on CubeSat Constellations

One critical challenge of disaster response management during long-lasting natural disasters and pandemics is to have a reliable communication infrastructure. Amongst different established communication technologies, satellite communication has provided a promising communication solution in disaster situations. CubeSats are a new breed of satellites that can provide communication needs at a much lower cost. In our work, we exploit the CubeSat, cognitive radio (CR), and deep reinforcement learning (RL) technologies to develop a CR-powered CubeSat constellation-enabled intelligent and resilient communication infrastructure as a disaster response system. Furthermore, to fulfill the communication requirements of different applications and ensure satisfactory experiences of the end users, our proposed communication infrastructure also enables a Quality of Experience (QoE)-aware traffic stream delivery mechanism to optimize the communication management. In our simulation results, we will evaluate the performance of our proposed communication infrastructure from two main perspectives: (1) the capability of ensuring the communication quality, and (2) the effective usage of communication resources.