Preliminary internetworking simulation of the QB50 cubesat constellation

Abstract

Constellations of small satellites now become a great alternative for scientific missions to study Earth. As a result, they should be considered appropriate communication mechanisms to retrieve the data collected. This article studies the possibility to implement TCP and UDP over IP through the use of intersatellite links and distributed ground stations, such as Genso project. We evaluate parameters like delay end-to-end and throughput for different configurations of the QB50 constellation proposed by von Karman Institute for Fluids Dynamics (VKI).