DESIGN OF A LOW-ORBIT-TO-GEOSTATIONARY SATELLITE LINK FOR MAXIMAL THROUGHPUT

We examine the design of a communication link involving the data trans fer from a small, low-orbit satellite to a ground station, but through a geostationary satellite, The advantage of this approach is that a s ingle ground station, which tracks only the geostationary satellite, m ay be shared by a multiplicity of small satellites. Our goal is to sel ect certain small satellite parameters - signaling rate, small satelli te antenna beamwidth, modulation scheme and coding scheme - which maxi mize the data throughput in bits/day, Our approach uses orbital simula tions of this scenario together with theoretical analysis based on the channel capacity C and cutoff rate R-0. The throughput achievable by several practical coding schemes is also examined.