Design and hardware implementation of reconfigurable nano satellite communication system using FPGA based SDR for FM/FSK demodulation and BPSK modulation

Communication system is one of the major areas in which digital signal processing finds direct application. Recent advances in signal processing have helped in enormously reducing the complexity of communication system design and also in improving the performance of the system. Software Defined Radio (SDR) enables in-orbit re-configurability of frequency, modulation scheme, data rate, bandwidth and channel coding in the case of satellite communication systems where component change is not possible after launch. This paper describes the design and hardware implementation of SDR type communication system based on FPGA for a nano satellite. The major functions carried out onboard are FM/FSK demodulation for tele command uplink and BPSK modulation with raised cosine filtering for telemetry downlink. The full system is designed and implemented based on Microsemi Smartfusion2 FPGA. For hardware evaluation of the system, Virtex-6 FPGA with high speed analog daughter card is employed. Test results are also provided at the end of the paper along with implementation of re-configurability.