Collaborative Network of Ground Stations with a Virtual Platform to Perform Diversity Combining

Abstract

A conventional ground station can establish a single downlink with only one satellite at a time through steerable high-gain antenna. In addition to the lack of tracking more than one satellite at once, such single radio communication is highly vulnerable to outages when experiencing severe degrading circumstances or even with steering engine failures. Accordingly, such problematic single radio link would leave the operator with no alternative options to overcome the consequences. This work exhibits a solution to the ground station through networking. Multiple ground stations, with omnidirectional antennas instead of the steerable directive ones, can be engaged in a collaborative network to receive multiple versions of the same transmitted data for processing and combining. The suggested receive diversity combining is performed at a virtual ground station which utilizes a combining algorithm to help detect the original data from the received versions with less errors and hence reflecting more efficient and reliable services. To exploit this aimed diversity gain, a simple combining algorithm is also developed in this article. The simulation results from the proposed scheme have indicated significant performance enhancement over the single site ground station. This cooperative scheme will not only improve the system performance but also offer to track more than one satellite at a time.