Design of a low-orbit-to-geostationary satellite link for maximal throughput

We examine the design of a communication link involving the data transfer from a small, low-orbit satellite to a ground station, but through a geostationary satellite. The advantage of this approach is that a single ground station, which tracks only the geostationary satellite, may be shared by a multiplicity of small satellites. Our goal is to select certain small satellite parameters-signaling rate, small satellite antenna beamwidth, modulation scheme and coding scheme-which maximize the data throughput in bits/day. Our approach uses orbital simulations of this scenario together with theoretical analysis based on the channel capacity and cutoff rate. The throughput achievable by several practical coding schemes is also examined