Inter-satellite radio links and spread-spectrum ranging for satellite formation flying

To maintain and control a satellite cluster effectively, an on-board executive controller is necessary. Both information exchange among satellites and relative position determination with high accuracy in real time are of prime importance in satellites formation flying. This paper firstly gives an overview of present research programs on formation flying satellite clusters with inter-satellite links (ISL). Several proposals for the development of ISL low layer protocols are presented in the paper. A novel satellite-to-satellite ranging model based on direct spread spectrum in inter-satellite radio links are presented, and finally, the corresponding expected system performance of ranging accuracy is analyzed theoretically.