A Novel Dissemination Protocol to Deploy Opportunistic Services in Federated Satellite Systems

Earth Observation applications are demanding higher spatial resolution and shorter revisit times than existing systems, which can be met by ad-hoc constellations of Federated Satellite Systems. These systems are distributed satellite architectures which rely on the collaboration between satellites that share unused resources, such as memory storage, computing capabilities, or downlink opportunities. In the same context, the Internet of Satellites paradigm expands the federation concept to a multi-hop scenario, without predefining a particular satellite system architecture, and deploying temporal satellite networks. The basis of both concepts is the offer of unused satellite resources as services. Therefore, it is necessary that satellites notify their availability to the other satellites that compose the system. This work presents a novel Opportunistic Service Availability Dissemination Protocol, which allows a satellite to publish an available service to be consumed by others. Details of the protocol behavior, and packet formats are presented as part of the protocol definition. The protocol has been verified in a realistic scenario composed of Earth Observation satellites, and the Telesat mega-constellation as network backbone. The achieved results demonstrate the benefits of using a protocol as the proposed one, which in some cases even doubles the amount of data that can be downloaded. To the best of our knowledge, this proposal is the first protocol that allows deploying opportunistic services for Federated Satellite Systems.