Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding for Small Satellite Applications

TL;DR

This paper develops an adaptive deep joint source-channel coding framework for small satellite communications, enabling efficient, robust data transmission across varying channel conditions with minimal model overhead.

Contribution

It introduces an adaptable neural network architecture with attention modules for satellite DJSCC, reducing storage needs and improving robustness over traditional methods.

Findings

Achieves comparable performance to multiple specialized models

Reduces model storage requirements significantly

Enhances robustness to channel estimation errors

Abstract

Small satellites used for Earth observation generate vast amounts of high-dimensional data, but their operation in low Earth orbit creates a significant communication bottleneck due to limited contact times and harsh, varying channel conditions. While deep joint source-channel coding (DJSCC) has emerged as a promising technique, its practical application to the complex satellite environment remains an open question. This paper presents a comprehensive DJSCC framework tailored for satellite communications. We first establish a basic system, DJSCC-SAT, and integrate a realistic, multi-state statistical channel model to guide its training and evaluation. To overcome the impracticality of using separate models for every channel condition, we then introduce an adaptable architecture, ADJSCC-SAT, which leverages attention modules to allow a single neural network to adjust to a wide range of channel states with minimal overhead. Through extensive evaluation on Sentinel-2 multi-spectral data, we demonstrate that our adaptable approach achieves performance comparable to using multiple specialized networks while significantly reducing model storage requirements. Furthermore, the adaptable model shows enhanced robustness to channel estimation errors, outperforming the non-adaptable baseline. The proposed framework is a practical and efficient step toward deploying robust, adaptive DJSCC systems for real-world satellite missions.