Nanosatellite Communication Constellation Testbed for Autonomous Scheduling Algorithms to Enable Mission Performance Analysis and Demonstration

Nanosatellite Communication Constellation Testbed for Autonomous Scheduling Algorithms to Enable Mission Performance Analysis and Demonstration

We describe a nanosatellite (nanosat) communication constellation testbed (NCCT) for evaluation and demonstration of autonomous nanosat message delivery scheduling algorithm. The testbed includes multiple flight computers with flight software and subsystem simulator representing nanosats and virtual ground nodes within a workstation that are connected via Ethernet forming a network constituting a nanosat communication constellation. The ability to prototype and evaluate autonomous scheduling algorithm interacting with the flight software at a mission level without on-orbit operation offers significant advantages to the nanosat system development since it is typically complex, hard to test and expensive using real systems. The NCCT provides interfaces to various nanosat subsystems including power module, radio transmitter and receiver and flight software, virtual ground nodes, and other simulation modules including message generation and nanosat orbit simulator. The configuration for the nanosat communication network simulation is entered by the user through a graphical user interface. We are currently developing a prototype testbed to evaluate a store-and-forward nanosat communication network including multiple nanosats and multiple ground nodes.