Cooperative Reception of Multiple Satellite Downlinks

Area of Science:

• Space engineering
• Telecommunications
• Signal processing

Background:

• Small satellites require dedicated ground stations for data downlink, which are costly and prone to single points of failure.
• Current ground stations with directional antennas can only communicate with one satellite at a time, limiting efficiency.
• System outages are a significant concern due to channel impairments or hardware failures in traditional ground stations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel receive diversity scheme for improving small satellite signal reception quality.
• To develop processing algorithms for virtually combining satellite downlink streams from multiple receivers.
• To reduce the vulnerability of small satellite data reception to system outages and channel impairments.

Main Methods:

• Implementing a receive diversity scheme using multiple, geographically separated omnidirectional receivers.
• Developing algorithms to virtually combine satellite downlink streams into a single virtual ground station.
• Utilizing cooperating software-defined radio receivers for signal processing and data aggregation.

Main Results:

• The virtual ground station significantly improves signal detection reliability compared to individual receiving sites.
• The bit error rate (BER) of the combined stream is lower than that of the best individual receiving site.
• The system reduces the probability of system outages, even with impairments at some receiving sites.
• Simultaneous data reception from multiple satellites in the same frequency band is enabled.

Conclusions:

• The proposed virtual ground station network offers a cost-effective and robust solution for small satellite data reception.
• This approach enhances system performance and reliability, crucial for the increasing number of small satellites.
• It mitigates the need for extensive, expensive ground station infrastructure with directional antennas and rotators.