Wireless Communication Technologies in Omnidirectional CubeSat Crosslink: Feasibility Study and Performance Analysis

An efficient omnidirectional CubeSat data crosslink is imperative to ensure the success of resource-intensive advanced CubeSat missions. In this article, we present a feasibility study of wireless technologies in high-speed CubeSat crosslink design. We study the power consumption, pointing requirement, and antenna requirement of each technology to implement an omnidirectional communicator. We also investigate the performance limit of the state-of-the-art wireless technologies considering the realizable link parameters. The achievable data rate and communication distance are studied thoroughly for different communication systems. The analyses show that an optical communication link is capable of delivering more than two orders of magnitude higher data throughput than that of microwave links in an omnidirectional platform. However, the study shows that due to the size and power restriction, a performance crossover region exists where the performance of a microwave channel exceeds the performance of the optical channel. The crossover distance and crossover data rate are studied thoroughly with different system configurations and modulation formats to assess the maximum reach of wireless technologies in a CubeSat crosslink.