Routing in CubeSat Networks: Protocols, Architectures and Standards

CubeSats, limited by size and mass, have limited functionality. These miniaturised satellites suffer from a low power budget, short radio range, low transmission speeds and limited data storage capacity. Regardless of these limitations, however, CubeSats have been deployed to carry out many research missions, for instance, gravity mapping and tracking air and marine navigation. One method of increasing their functionality and reducing their limitations is to form CubeSat networks, or swarms, where many CubeSats work together to carry out a mission. Nevertheless, due to given limitations of range, the network may still have intermittent connectivity and, accordingly, data communication becomes challenging in such a disjointed network where there is no contemporaneous path between source and destination. When the network is disjointed, the rate of dropped packets increases making the performance of traditional TCP/IP protocols inefficient.