Software defined radios for small satellites

Abstract

Clusters, constellations, formations, or 'swarms' of small satellites are fast becoming a way to perform scientific and technological missions more affordably. As objectives of these missions become more ambitious, there are still problems in increasing the number of communication windows, supporting multiple signals, and increasing data rates over reliable intersatellite and ground links to Earth. Also, there is a shortage of available frequencies in the 2 m and 70 cm bands due to rapid increase in the number of CubeSats orbiting the Earth - leading to further regulatory issues. Existing communication systems and radio signal processing Intellectual Property (IP) cores cannot fully address these challenges. One of the possible strategies to solve these issues is by equipping satellites with a Software Defined Radio (SDR). SDR is a key area to realise various software implementations which enable an adaptive and reconfigurable communication system without changing any hardware device or feature. This paper proposes a new SDR architecture which utilises a combination of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and field programmable Radio Frequency (RF) transceiver to solve back-end and front- end challenges and thereby enabling reception of multiple signals or satellites using single user equipment. © 2014 IEEE.