The Internet of Space Things (CubeSats)

Overview

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been recognized as a key driver of 5G wireless communications, with a projected 50 billion endpoints by 2020 ranging from connected temperature sensors to unmanned aerial vehicles. The long term success of IoT is tied to its pervasiveness, an area where the heterogeneous connectivity solutions of today fall short by a large margin. The true potential of IoT can only be realized when it is augmented with a ubiquitous connectivity platform capable of functioning even in the most remote of locations. To this end, this project focuses on the development of a novel cyber-physical system spanning ground, air, and space, called the Internet of Space Things/CubeSats (IoST). IoST expands the functionalities of traditional IoT, by not only providing an always-available satellite backhaul network, but also by contributing real-time satellite-captured information and, more importantly, performing integration of on the ground data and satellite information to enable new applications. The fundamental building block for IoST is a new generation of nano-satellites known as CubeSats, which are augmented with SDN and NFV solutions.

The primary research objectives of this project include:

Development of reconfigurable multi-band radios covering wide spectrums at microwaves, mm-wave, THz band, and optical frequencies to accommodate high-throughput services.

Design of multi-band antenna arrays based on new materials such as graphene, which allow the creation of programmable antenna architectures with tunable frequency and radiation diagram.

Deep neural networks-enabled resource allocation strategies for self-learning and optimization of CubeSat network.

Tackling long delays and temporal variation in network topology through new concepts such as Stateful Segment Routing.

Proactive handovers through Ground-to-satellite link outage forecasting and satellite diversity.

Lightweight hardware virtualization for CubeSats with full networking support.