Decentralized Cooperative Navigation for Spacecraft

This paper describes a navigation technique called Decentralized, Cooperative Navigation (DCN) that uses a communications network with inter-node ranging to make use of the information from several satellites or other platforms to cooperatively navigate. Further, the computations are performed at each node, without the use of a central computing node, so that the network is robust, allowing nodes to enter and leave as they become available. Simulation results are presented which compare individual satellite navigation performance at Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO) with the navigational performance accuracy achieved at each node of a networked, small collection of nodes. Various configurations of GEO and other nodes are considered. Results indicate that navigation accuracy can be brought to the tens of meters, or even single meter, level using this DCN technique. Not only would this navigation improvement save fuel, but it would facilitate proximity operations at GEO and beyond.