Adjustable energy consumption access scheme for satellite cluster networks

Satellite clusters have been satisfactorily implemented in a number of applications, such as positioning and sensor networks, with the purpose of improving communication system capabilities. However, because the use of clusters requires good management of the resources, those solutions imply new challenges for communication systems. This paper focuses on improving the data management between network elements by considering a network formed by satellite clusters. Satellite clusters work in cooperation to provide real-time and non-real-time services in different footprint areas. This study proposes the adjustable energy consumption access scheme (AECS) as one possible solution response to particular necessities of communication and at the same time, as a way of decreasing the system energy consumption. Energy consumption is a key issue that concerns green network operations and it is directly linked to the cooperation and coordination between network elements. On the other hand, we support the implementation of Optical Inter-Satellite Links (OISL) for communication between cluster elements. The analysis involves the study of energy consumption, transmission delay, specific link margins, bit error rate (BER) and QoS.