Estimation of capabilities of cooperative CubeSat systems based on Alamouti transmission scheme

Due to the size constraints of the CubeSat satellites and hence the limited capabilities in terms of battery power and solar panel's area, highly energy efficient transmission schemes are required. However, we can consider CubeSat satellites as a prospective tool for communication. In this case the effective transmission channels between CubeSats and a ground station should be optimized in terms of energy efficiency, robustness, Bit Error Ratio performance and capacity. One of the approaches to reduce the required energy consumption is to reduce the required Signal-to-Noise Ratio. We evaluate different coding schemes including LDPC and space-time codes. Due to the limited size of the CubeSat systems the use of cooperative schemes can be beneficial and shall be considered. Cooperative schemes in this context are schemes, in which several devices are virtually treated as to be a single one. Different system models for cooperative communication and basic results of the link budget calculation are presented in the introduction. A comparison of the Bit-Error- Ratio performance for different cases of using Alamouti codes as well as inter-satellite link budget calculations are shown in the main part of this paper.