Opportunistic Federation of CubeSat Constellations: a Game-Changing Paradigm Enabling Enhanced IoT Services in the Sky

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel opportunistic federation model for multiple CubeSat constellations, enabling enhanced IoT services in space by leveraging cooperative strategies from terrestrial IoT networks, resulting in improved task completion rates.

Contribution

It extends the Mobile-IoT-Federation-as-a-Service paradigm to satellite networks, proposing a dynamic federation model for CubeSat constellations to improve IoT service efficiency.

Findings

Higher percentage of tasks successfully completed with the proposed cooperation.

Enhanced performance through effective satellite constellation federation.

Demonstrated benefits of cooperative strategies in space-based IoT networks.

Abstract

Internet of Space Things (IoST) is a challenging paradigm, which is currently attracting great interest from the scientific and industrial communities. IoST is based on the integration of the space segment into the global Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure. In the relevant literature, reference is generally made to multiple constellations of nanosatellite platforms, used to enable IoT services on a global scale, including also disadvantaged and poorly infrastructured areas. In this paper, we focus on multi-tenant IoT scenarios, wherein multiple CubeSats constellations are enabled to offer services by exploiting a dynamic federation model. The objective is to efficiently provide services in an IoST scenario by leveraging an effective cooperation strategy originally designed for terrestrial IoT networks, the Mobile-IoT-Federation-as-a-Service (MIFaaS) paradigm. We extend this vision to IoT satellite networks in order to allow a constellation of satellites to effectively execute tasks through a tight cooperative behaviour with other CubeSats constellations. The reported performance evaluation studies show that better performance, in terms of percentage of tasks successfully completed, can be achieved through the implementation of the proposed cooperation paradigm.