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A Distributed and Hybrid Ground Station Network for Low Earth Orbit Satellites

Published: 04 November 2020 Publication History
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    Low Earth Orbit satellites for Earth observation have become very popular in recent years due to their ability to take high-resolution images of the Earth at high revisit rates. These satellites collect hundreds of GigaBytes of imagery during their orbit. This data needs to be downloaded using ground stations on Earth. However, due to the low altitudes, the satellites move fast with respect to a ground station, and consequently, have a few minutes time window to download the data to a single station. We propose a geographically distributed ground station design, DGS, that improves robustness and reduces downlink latency. DGS is the first system to use a hybrid ground station model, where only a subset of ground stations are uplink-capable. This paper evaluates the feasibility of this design using simulations and empirical measurements.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        HotNets '20: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
        November 2020
        228 pages
        ISBN:9781450381451
        DOI:10.1145/3422604
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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        Published: 04 November 2020

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        Author Tags

        1. distributed ground station
        2. earth observation
        3. ground station architecture
        4. leo satellites
        5. networks
        6. satellite ground stations
        7. satellite networks

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        • (2023)Kodan: Addressing the Computational Bottleneck in SpaceProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 310.1145/3582016.3582043(392-403)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2023
        • (2023)Transmitting, Fast and Slow: Scheduling Satellite Traffic through Space and TimeProceedings of the 29th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3570361.3592521(1-15)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2023
        • (2023)StarFront: Cooperatively Constructing Pervasive and Low-Latency CDNs Upon Emerging LEO Satellites and CloudsIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2023.326016631:6(2559-2574)Online publication date: Dec-2023
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