Titulo Estágio
Designing Satellite Constellations to Improve Network Usage
Áreas de especialidade
Sistemas Inteligentes
Comunicações, Serviços e Infraestruturas
Local do Estágio
CISUC
Enquadramento
With the increasing demands for global connectivity, there is a need to ensure communication in the most remote areas and to have reliable methods of communication. With recent developments of space technologies and decrease of operation costs, satellite communications can provide a direct solution for the coverage issue [1]. From communication to navigation, there are hundreds of satellites orbiting the Earth with different types of orbits. Each set of satellites is called a constellation, which must ensure communication to the ground stations according to the existing requirements. This problem has been widely researched and even appeared in competitions organised by ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team [2].
One main issue is how to optimise the parameters of a constellation and the number of satellites in it. This problem is called the satellite constellation design [3], where the goal is to deploy as few satellites as possible while providing the maximum coverage. Despite being a continuous problem, several attempts have been made to use mixed integer linear programming formulations to solve different variants of the problem [4]. With previous knowledge, such as number of ground stations and altitude of the orbit, it is possible to reduce the search space and apply combinatorial techniques to tackle this problem. Thus, it is of interest to develop algorithms to tackle this problem in a reasonable time-frame, such as metaheuristics.
This work will focus on developing metaheuristics and other algorithms to solve the Satellite Constellation Design problem. The student is expected to study existing satellite orbits and constellations and analyse number of ground stations and other relevant parameters that influence the communication performance. To evaluate the approach, the student will consider several existing constellations, such as Iridium and Walker constellations, and analyse the performance of communication between the generated constellation and the existing ones. Moreover, these constellations may be used as a starting solutions to be improved.
References:
[1] O. Kodheli et al., ‘Satellite Communications in the New Space Era: A Survey and Future Challenges’, IEEE Communications Surveys Tutorials, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 70–109, 2021, doi: 10.1109/COMST.2020.3028247.
[2] https://optimise.esa.int/challenge/spoc-2-quantum-communications-constellations/About
[3] Lo, M., 1999, "Satellite-Constellation Design", https://hdl.handle.net/2014/17102, JPL Open Repository
[4] L. Mencarelli, J. Floquet, F. Georges, and D. Grenier, ‘Mixed integer (non)linear approaches for the satellite constellation design problem’, Optim Eng, Oct. 2022, doi: 10.1007/s11081-022-09774-9.
Objetivo
The goal of this work is to develop metaheuristics to solve the discrete satellite constellation design problem by minimising the number of satellites and maximising area coverage. For the experimental analysis, different orbits and number of ground stations will be modelled.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
• Literature review of different satellite constellations and orbits
• Familiarisation with relevant libraries
• Implementation of a preliminary metaheuristic
• Writing of the intermediate report
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
• Development of metaheuristics for the satellite constellation design problem
• Experimental evaluation
• Writing of the final report
Condições
The work is to be executed at the laboratories of the CISUC’s NCS group. A workplace will be provided as well as the required computational resources.
Orientador
Noé Godinho
noe@dei.uc.pt 📩