Constellation Design for New Space Applications

Emerging applications pose varying communication requirements on network capacity, latency, and coverage for terrestrial and satellite systems that can be integrated for seamless coverage and high performance. Satellite systems have a crucial role in modern society in supporting end-user applications anywhere. The design of a satellite constellation for a specific set of applications is a challenging task. A constellation designer has to be able to transform requirements on latency, throughput, and availability to the features of a constellation. This chapter focuses on the constellation design procedures, especially for LEO satellites. We explain different constellation formations and construction methods, such as Walker and Street-of-Coverage methods, and concentrate on constellation design parameters that influence the overall system performance. We distinguish the following groups of applications for the satellite constellation design: Earth observation applications, IoT applications, and multilayered satellite applications.