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Towards Satellite-to-Satellite Communication in Hybrid LEO Satellite and Vehicular Network Simulations
MA: Master's Thesis (or Diploma Thesis / Diplomarbeit)
In order to provide low-latency high-throughput Internet access all over the world, companies like SpaceX, Amazon, and OneWeb currently deploy and maintain Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. Thousands of small satellites orbit Earth at an altitude of roughly 500km. Such a system is perfect for supporting vehicular networks by means of providing Internet access even in regions in which cellular communication technologies like LTE or 5G are not available. For evaluating LEO satellite supported vehicular networks, the simulator Space_Veins is currently developed by us [1]. It integrates LEO satellites in a Veins simulation to simulate Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks. In order to use space_Veins for simulating scenarios in which a vehicle communicates with a ground station served by a different LEO satellite than the vehicle, S2S communication must be simulated. However, the current implementation of space_Veins does not support Satellite-to-Satellite (S2S) communication.
Goals of the thesis
To support this functionality, the goal of this work is the design and the implementation of an abstract physical layer model for S2S communication. It should assume Earth to be a sphere and S2S communication to be not possible if the direct Line-of-Sight between two satellites is blocked by Earth. The work is concluded by a simulation study investigating the number of S2S hops and paths for different locations of transmitter and receiver pairs on Earth. Additionally, the LEO satellite density is varied.
Basically, the following steps need to be performed:
- Get familiar with the existing implementation
- Specify a physical layer model that assumes Earth to be a sphere and S2S communication to be blocked by it
- Implement the physical layer model
- Conduct a simulation study investigating the number of S2S hops and paths for different transmitter and receiver locations on Earth as well as for varying LEO satellite densities
Keywords
C++, Network Simulation, Vehicular Networking, LEO Satellite Constellation, Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks
Literature
[1] Mario Franke and Christoph Sommer, “Toward Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network Simulation with 4D Topologies,” Proceedings of 19th IEEE/IFIP Conference on Wireless On demand Network Systems and Services (WONS 2024), Chamonix, France, January 2024. https://www.cms-labs.org/bib/franke2023toward/