PSO based data routing in a networked distributed Pico-satellites system

Low earth orbit satellites networks are capable of providing wireless connectivity to any part of the world while guaranteeing lower delays and better bit error rate performance. During the last years, there have been many growing interests towards the development of small satellites. Using these miniaturized systems as a cooperating network allows cost saving and a short development period. However, these systems present the drawback of energy management which is the most important problem to care about. Therefore, the optimization of the processing time and the efficient implementation of the information flow and storage on board must be discussed with respect to the quick topology changes. In this paper, we discuss the use of a network of Pico-satellites with distributed tasks instead of one big satellite to get a fault-tolerant and a robust system, this will be helpful for cost saves and development time reducing. Thus, we have to consider an intelligent system able to achieve several space missions such as attitude control, telemetry and communication. So, we present as a first step different routing algorithms used in small satellites and terrestrial networks. In addition, we present the proposed simulation system which is based on satellite position prediction, satellites tracking software and the use of a Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) as an intelligent technique for information assignment. As a result, the simulation shows the importance of the use of intelligent techniques in space application due to the complicated environment and the lack of energy sources compared to the earth networks. In deed, The PSO solution avoids the use of one satellite in a critical state and generates a good quality of service when big data traffic in the network occurs, that is because of sharing and distributing the whole traffic process. This solution allows the sustainability of the network and a better Quality of service.