Towards Successful Integration of Small Satellites into the Terrestrial IoT Networks

Abstract

Nowadays, countless daily life services are conveniently provided to the users by connecting billions of devices through Internet of Things (IoT). However, current IoT networks are not yet ubiquitous. They are unavailable in the less inhabited areas such as oceans, forests, and deserts. Accordingly, for omnipresent coverage of the future generations of communications, satellites must get integrated into IoT networks. Because of their low altitude, low earth orbit (LEO) satellites have attracted attention towards the integration in the terrestrial IoT networks. Nonetheless, most of the recently launched LEO satellites are tiny ones designed to provide affordable space missions. CubeSats, for instance, are popular LEO satellites with limited size and resources. These limitations imply low transmitting power and low gain onboard antennas. As a result, the relevant receiving ground stations (GSs) would have to utilize high gain antennas with expensive and complex steering resources to receive such weak signals. This article suggests a GS-based solution by applying the receive diversity combining approach. To prove the concept, this work utilized the GSs community of Satellite Networked Open Ground Station (SatNOGS) to record real satellite signals. The combining resulted in an enhanced quality stream in terms of detection errors compared to each individual GS. Indeed, the combining gain can compensate the missing gain if the traditional expensive receiving antenna with its complex steering mechanism is replaced by cheaper omnidirectional antenna.