Advancing Satellite Network Performance: Network Analysis for Federated Satellite Systems

An increasing number of satellite constellations being deployed in orbit fosters the introduction of a more efficient paradigm of distributed, interconnected orbital assets to ensure better resource exploitation in orbit. This paper aims to illustrate through quantitative modeling the effects of satellites on board available resources and inter-satellite telecommunication hypotheses on the overall operations of a federated satellite system network. Key research questions addressed by this work include the performance quantification of a one hundred CubeSats federated satellite system network in terms of network response and data volume exchanged under several onboard resource constraints. The applicability of a federated satellite system to a time-critical disaster response monitoring scenario has also been verified to assess the practical implementation of such a paradigm in reduced inter-satellite communicability conditions. A distributed simulator based on the IEEE 1516–2010 standard is employed to obtain the federated satellite system network topology according to the individual satellite operations to analyze the network performances, exploiting an approach based on the network’s adjacency matrix. Despite reduced communicability, which limits the average inter-satellite link to an 8 bps time-averaged goodput due to poor onboard resources availability, the federated satellite system proves to be an auto-sufficient and decentralized paradigm, capable of responding to a time-critical scenario such as a rapid mapping request after a natural disaster in under 6 hours. As a result, this work provides the foundation for more detailed development of a federate satellite network, compliant with current radiofrequency regulations.