CubeSat Torrent: Torrent like distributed communications for CubeSat satellite clusters

Abstract

CubeSat is a pico satellite weighing one kilogram, measuring one liter in volume and is used primarily for space research. Low data rate communication limits the use of CubeSats for missions like imaging and remote sensing. In this paper we study how power, volume and geometry constraints of a CubeSat satellite cripple CubeSat communications and introduce CubeSat Torrent, a Torrent like distributed communication system, for CubeSat clusters. CubeSat Torrent aims to increase the downlink and uplink speeds of large files by distributing pieces of the files to CubeSats in the cluster and downloading different pieces of the files simultaneously from different CubeSats. The proposed system proved, through simulation experiments, to substantially improve the download and upload times of large files by a factor of about the size of cluster. Future work will include Distributed File System and Distributed Processing Framework for CubeSat clusters to store large amounts of data and do large scale data processing.