Autonomous and Resilient Control for Optimal LEO Satellite Constellation Coverage Against Space Threats

TL;DR

This paper presents a distributed, autonomous control framework for LEO satellite constellations that enhances resilience against space threats like debris and adversaries, ensuring continuous coverage through self-healing mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrative framework combining coverage modeling, game-theoretic planning, and MPC-based control for resilient satellite constellation management.

Findings

Effective resilient coverage planning and control demonstrated in case study.

Satellite constellation maintains coverage despite adversarial and non-adversarial attacks.

Proposed algorithms enable autonomous self-healing of satellite networks.

Abstract

LEO satellite constellation coverage has served as the base platform for various space applications. However, the rapidly evolving security environment such as orbit debris and adversarial space threats are greatly endangering the security of satellite constellation and integrity of the satellite constellation coverage. As on-orbit repairs are challenging, a distributed and autonomous protection mechanism is necessary to ensure the adaptation and self-healing of the satellite constellation coverage from different attacks. To this end, we establish an integrative and distributed framework to enable resilient satellite constellation coverage planning and control in a single orbit. Each satellite can make decisions individually to recover from adversarial and non-adversarial attacks and keep providing coverage service. We first provide models and methodologies to measure the coverage performance. Then, we formulate the joint resilient coverage planning-control problem as a two-stage problem. A coverage game is proposed to find the equilibrium constellation deployment for resilient coverage planning and an agent-based algorithm is developed to compute the equilibrium. The multi-waypoint Model Predictive Control (MPC) methodology is adopted to achieve autonomous self-healing control. Finally, we use a typical LEO satellite constellation as a case study to corroborate the results.