LEO satellite constellations for autonomous system operation in the Arctic region: situational awareness and communication aspects

This doctoral thesis comprises a summary of novel results concentrated on low Earth orbit satellite constellation design for situational awareness and communication applications for autonomous mobile systems, namely vessels and vehicles. The concept of situational awareness in this thesis incorporates the ability to monitor the environment, to react to situations and act accordingly in a timely manner. The communication aspects include the ability to communicate the data between interested parties in a reliable matter with respect to the key performance indicators of an application.
The main contributions of this thesis are as follows. Firstly, the thesis analyses the requirements for mobile autonomous systems, reviews different satellite systems and their constellation design methods, and discusses simulation tools applicable in designing satellite constellations.
Secondly, the thesis provides guidelines and a methodology for the constellation design, including novel contributions for application-specific sustainable designs that can be used when developing Earth observation and communications systems. Moreover, new tools are developed that combine satellite propagation models and allow detailed link and network analysis. In particular, the thesis presents a newly developed tool for satellite-terrestrial communications for network traffic analysis. Metrics such as the age of data, coverage and revisit time of satellites provide the means to optimise the design. Satellite constellation design for communication purposes includes metrics such as delay, throughput, packet delivery probability and availability of the satellites to communicate the data.
Thirdly, using the developed methodology and tools, the thesis provides results in selected studies including interference management between satellite and terrestrial networks and end-to-end networking to support defined autonomous system applications. The studies include performance analysis of real satellite systems such as Starlink and Iridium, as well as analysis of other systems using simulations.
The current development trend in the satellite industry is in LEO constellations, multi-layer networks and integrated satellite-terrestrial systems. Therefore the methods and solutions in the thesis are targeted towards such complex systems.