Evaluating the Communication Reliability of Earth-Moon Satellite Constellations Using Model Counting
I. Băcălie (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
N. Yorke-Smith – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
A.L.D. Latour – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Max Bannach – Mentor
F.A. Oliehoek – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
As interest in lunar missions continues to grow, reliable communication between the Earth and the Moon becomes increasingly important. One way to achieve such communication is through satellite constellations, in which satellites communicate through inter-satellite links. However, evaluating the reliability of such constellations is a challenging problem due to continuously changing satellite positions.
In this thesis, we study how the communication reliability of Earth--Moon satellite constellations can be modelled and evaluated. We represent the communication network as a probabilistic graph, in which vertices correspond to satellites and edges correspond to communication links. We consider two reliability metrics: the probability that communication exists between Earth and Moon ground-connected satellites and the probability that the entire network is connected. We also study hop-constrained variants of these metrics, as in quantum communication the number of relay hops is limited.
To evaluate the communication reliability of Earth-Moon satellite constellations, we use projected weighted model counting. Starting from Walker constellations around both the Earth and the Moon, we propagate satellite positions over time. At selected discrete timestamps, we build probabilistic networks to represent the constellation at that point in time. We then encode communication properties as propositional formulas and apply projected weighted model counting to compute reliability. We compare two encodings: one based on reachability, adapted from existing work, and one that explicitly models communication paths.
We evaluate the proposed approach on multiple constellation configurations and timestamps. The experiments provide insights into the factors affecting communication reliability and the computational performance of the two encodings. The results show that projected weighted model counting can be used to evaluate the reliability of dynamic Earth--Moon satellite communication networks, while also highlighting scalability challenges for larger problem instances.