Capturing High Rate Satellite Data. An Analysis of Lossless, Persistent Reception, Local Storage and Transmission of High Rate Satellite Data From Time Window Based Datastream

Abstract

Satellites generate data through their instruments as they hover in orbit. Satel- lite data is widely used in weather forecasts, environmental science, for military purposes, earth observation and more. The world depend on satellite data, for many purposes.

As satellite technology moves forward, the amount of data generated per orbit increases. Satellites are not equipped with unlimited storage capacity, meaning that the generated data must be transmitted to a ground station at some point in orbit. Satellites transmit data through the use of radio waves, and have the later years used X-, S-, L-band, among others. An increase in generated data, require an increase in the transfer rates between the satellite and ground station. Therefore, the satellite industry will, in near future, build satellites using KA-band using a higher frequency area providing larger bandwidth. The increase in generated data forces the increase in data transmission rate, which require high performance ground stations that can capture incoming high rate data.

A ground station’s purpose is to capture the received satellite data, without data loss. Until today several capturing systems provide rates between 1 and 3Gbps, depending on the band used, modulation, whether near real-time processing is offered or not and whether data is actually captured and stored within the same chassis[60, 4, 73, 36]. With KA-band, the rates can exceed 10Gbps, and it is the industry mission to provide systems that can capture such data rates.

This thesis evaluate the next generation technology used to capture data, determining the bottleneck in the setup used today through the analysis tool developed, and further resolving them. The changes suggested in this thesis are tested and evaluated, and show that the next generation servers can capture 10Gbps with the hardware and software available, which is higher than any other related system found.