remote sensing Article Towards Federated Satellite Systems and Internet of Satellites: The Federation Deployment Control Protocol Joan A. Ruiz-de-Azua 1,2,3,* , Nicola Garzaniti 4 , Alessandro Golkar 4 , Anna Calveras 1 and Adriano Camps 2,3 1 Department of Network Engineering, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya—UPC BarcelonaTech, 08034 Barcelona, Spain;
[email protected] 2 Department of Signal Theory and Communications, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya—UPC BarcelonaTech, 08034 Barcelona, Spain;
[email protected] 3 Research Group in Space Science and Technologies (CTE-UPC), Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC), 08034 Barcelona, Spain 4 Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech), 143026 Skolkovo, Russia;
[email protected] (N.G.);
[email protected] (A.G.) * Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract: Presently, the Earth Observation community is demanding applications that provide low latency and high downlink capabilities. An increase in downlink contacts becomes essential to meet these new requirements. The Federated Satellite Systems concept addresses this demand by promoting satellite collaborations to share unused downlink opportunities. These collaborations are established opportunistically and temporarily, posing multiple technology challenges to be implemented in-orbit. This work contributes to the definition of the Federation Deployment Control Protocol which formalizes a mechanism to fairly establish and manage these collaborations by Citation: Ruiz-de-Azua, J.A.; employing a negotiation process between the satellites. Moreover, this manuscript presents the Garzaniti, N.; Golkar, A.; Calveras, A.; results of a validation campaign of this protocol with three stratospheric balloons. In summary, more Camps, A. Towards Federated than 27 federations with 63.0% of throughput were established during the field campaign.