Improved Power Control Approach for Better Data Throughput in CubeSat Nanosatellites

Adaptive/Variable Coding and Modulation (ACM/VCM) techniques have been used to enhance the data throughput of CubeSat nanosatellites with limited resources and communication capabilities. On average, these techniques showed an improvement by almost doubling the data throughput over the traditional fixed modulation method. To move beyond that, we seek to further enhance the performance of the VCM/ACM techniques by considering the CubeSat’s power features. Altering the power level is a key contributor in the process of selecting the suitable modulation and coding option of the VCM/ACM techniques. In this paper, we introduce our approach named “Improved Power Control” (IPC), which is based on the combination of Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) and Adaptive Power Control (APC) techniques.Simulation studies are performed on a sample remote-sensing CubeSat mission that takes photos from the payload camera and sends them to the ground station. Performance comparison of the three modulation techniques (fixed modulation, ACM, and IPC) is carried out with respect to the total data throughput and the total number of photos that can be downloaded from the CubeSat. The results show that the IPC approach, which considers the CubeSat’s power feature while applying the ACM technique, outperforms the simple fixed methods by a wide margin. When compared to the ACM method deployed alone, IPC offers 35% more data throughput and 80% more photos downloaded in the said remote-sensing CubeSat mission.