Research Projects

Background: With the advancement of space technologies, reusable rockets, and the mass production of satellites, we are witnessing a space race to deploy Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites (below 2000km altitude) between new space players. One of these space players, SpaceX, has recently received authorization from FCC to deploy a Gen2 constellation of upto 7,500 satellites into orbits. These 2nd generation satellites are supposed to be equipped with inter-satellite links (ISLs) – these ISLs are optical laser links connecting adjacent satellites to create a mesh network in space. Apart from SpaceX, OneWeb, Kuiper and Telesat plan to deploy around 618, 3,236 and 1,671 satellites, respectively in LEO. This brings several research challenges that span from constellation topology design to routing and traffic management in the presence of LEO dynamics. Research objectives: The primary objective of this project is to build a LEO constellation design solution that can be useful to the new space players. A space player can provide its network budget (i.e. the number of satellites it wants to deploy), target market (i.e. the network traffic that it wants to serve), along with other constants (i.e. ITU/FCC guidelines and restrictions) to this framework, which it will use to compute and produce the near-optimal constellation design parameters. In addition to this, our next objective is to design appropriate routing and handoff management schemes for a fast-moving LEO network, which is quite different than existing schemes designed for terrestrial networks. We will study the reconfigurable ability of the inter-satellite link (ISL) optical lasers to solve the LEO network topology design problem along with the trajectory design one. We will build a unified framework that will integrate the trajectory and topology design of the LEO satellites, along with their route adaptation strategies. In addition to the problem of constellation design, we will also study how cooperative beam management from different satellite antennas can be used to meet the network user’s dynamic traffic demands. Finally, we will also study the effect of solar super-storms on LEO network. Research contributions and significance: In this project, we will develop various LEO network frameworks for (a) designing the topologies and trajectories of LEO satellites to meet the users demands and operator’s constraints, (b) studying the resilience of LEO network in presence of solar weather, and (c) studying various adaptive network protocols, like routing, beam placement, handoff management etc. The project brings several important research directions to the research community. In general, the network design problem is computationally a hard problem -- a LEO network design problem brings additional complexities of joint optimizing various constellation parameters in presence of satellite mobility, which makes it a non-trivial optimization problem. Apart from that, none of the existing works in the literature have explored the complete set of constellation design parameters for both trajectory and topology design, which will make this research particularly unique to the research community. In addition to that, the resiliency of LEO network in presence of solar weather is not yet well-studied and well-understood to the research community. Overall, the project will help the research community understand this “new network space” better. The proposal will be particularly well-timed and interesting in Indian context, as Starlink has recently planning to move into the Indian space. Recently, Bharti Enterprises is investing heavily into OneWeb, whereas Reliance JioSpace is also ramping up efforts to start satellite Internet service in India. The project is expected to design constellation design frameworks/tools, which will be shared as an open source platform – we expect that this will be particularly useful to Indian space players like ISRO and other Indian space startups.