Application of Wireless Satellite Bus in micro-satellite design

Reliability and validity have always been the most important criteria in micro-satellite designing. Beside this, other important factors such as miniaturization, fault tolerance, data rate, redundancy and power consumption should also be fulfilled by satellite systems. The limitation to reliability and redundancy is the interdependent links of subsystem and wiring harness and connectors. The physical links lead to potential risk of damages, and the weight of bus systems together with the connectors and power distribution lines almost occupy 10% of the dry mass of a micro-satellite. This paper addressed one solution to improve the performance of reliability and subsequently reduce the harness significantly by adopting Wireless Satellite Bus (WSB) to remove the wired cables and build intra-satellite networks, in which every subsystem as a node in networks are independent from each other and can communicate with others without wired links. It can also reduce the cost and time, and increase the reliability and flexibility, and this may lead to revolutionary changes in the concept of micro-satellite design. This paper highlighted the advantages and challenges of Wireless Satellite Bus, and discussed the architecture of the networks. Additionally, the commercial off-the-shell (COTS) protocols available were evaluated and further requirements were presented.