Real-time Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks for Satellite and Spacecraft Applications (Internet of Things & WSN Europe 2014)

• Satellites and spacecrafts are currently relying on dedicated cabled communication means for the ground tests as well as in-flight control applications, for which the rising cabling complexity of the ever-increasing number of sensors becomes unmanageable. The resulting constraints in terms of timeliness and throughput cannot not be met by current wireless standards.

• However, the advances in WSN technologies (both at the physical layer and the protocol levels) allows for the development of dedicated wireless networks based on commercial off-the-shelf components. CSEM has been addressing such bespoke systems for more than 10 years, and has developed an unrivalled expertise in WSN deployments for critical applications.

• The presentation will present the main requirements for intra spacecraft communications. Given the highly metallic structures, IEEE 802.15.4a IR-UWB has been selected. However, the IEEE 802.15.4 medium access control does not meet the needed predictability and performances. The presentation will show the options that were selected to meet the requirements. The talk will show how the chosen solutions may be applied to similar problems in transportation and industrial applications.

Dr. Philippe Dallemagne joined CSEM in 1999. He is currently managing projects at CSEM in the domains of energy-autonomous wireless sensor networks, real-time communication and dynamic complex systems. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1998 from the Université Henri Poincaré of Nancy, France. Before joining CSEM, he worked for IBM Analysis and Design Tools Lab. in Paris. He has an extensive experience of the software design and development in the context of industrial automation and telecommunications and on computer-assisted software engineering. He is the author of several papers in International Conferences. He is also the Swiss representative and Secretary of the IFIP Technical Committee 5.

CSEM is a private non-profit Swiss research organization and acts as a technology provider for the industrial sector. As a recognized RTO, CSEM develops innovative technology platforms and offers services from contract R&D to development of solutions for applications including medical, transport, energy, security, life sciences, and telecom. CSEM has been active in the wearable technology domain for 20+ years and its medical device technology is certified ISO 13485. It has long-term and widespread competencies in the development of low-power wireless sensors for human-monitoring applications comprising sensor electronics, signal processing and advanced feature extraction at the sensor level or in the cloud, big data analysis, and machine learning.