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Nanosatellite Constellation and Ground Station Co-design for Low-Latency Critical Event Detection

Zhuo Cheng, Brandon Lucia

TL;DR

This work addresses the challenge of achieving low end-to-end latency for critical Earth-observation events using nanosatellite constellations. It shows that capture latency, not transmission, largely drives end-to-end delay even in large constellations, and conducts a measurement-driven study of how orbital design and ground-station placement affect latency. The authors propose Gyrfalcon, a design guidance framework that optimizes constellation planes and ground-station locations, and demonstrate significant latency reductions (5.6 to 8.2×) across six use cases. The findings offer actionable, low-cost deployment strategies for high-coverage, low-latency event detection in real-world operations.

Abstract

Advancements in nanosatellite technology lead to more Earth-observation satellites in low-Earth orbit. We explore using nanosatellite constellations to achieve low-latency detection for time-critical events, such as forest fires, oil spills, and floods. The detection latency comprises three parts: capture, compute and transmission. Previous solutions reduce transmission latency, but we find that the bottleneck is capture latency, accounting for more than 90% of end-to-end latency. We present a measurement study on how various satellite and ground station design factors affect latency. We offer design guidance to operators on how to choose satellite orbital configurations and design an algorithm to choose ground station locations. For six use cases, our design guidance reduces end-to-end latency by 5.6 to 8.2 times compared to the existing system.

Nanosatellite Constellation and Ground Station Co-design for Low-Latency Critical Event Detection

TL;DR

This work addresses the challenge of achieving low end-to-end latency for critical Earth-observation events using nanosatellite constellations. It shows that capture latency, not transmission, largely drives end-to-end delay even in large constellations, and conducts a measurement-driven study of how orbital design and ground-station placement affect latency. The authors propose Gyrfalcon, a design guidance framework that optimizes constellation planes and ground-station locations, and demonstrate significant latency reductions (5.6 to 8.2×) across six use cases. The findings offer actionable, low-cost deployment strategies for high-coverage, low-latency event detection in real-world operations.

Abstract

Advancements in nanosatellite technology lead to more Earth-observation satellites in low-Earth orbit. We explore using nanosatellite constellations to achieve low-latency detection for time-critical events, such as forest fires, oil spills, and floods. The detection latency comprises three parts: capture, compute and transmission. Previous solutions reduce transmission latency, but we find that the bottleneck is capture latency, accounting for more than 90% of end-to-end latency. We present a measurement study on how various satellite and ground station design factors affect latency. We offer design guidance to operators on how to choose satellite orbital configurations and design an algorithm to choose ground station locations. For six use cases, our design guidance reduces end-to-end latency by 5.6 to 8.2 times compared to the existing system.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 26 sections, 5 equations, 30 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background and Motivation
  3. Problem: low-latency event detection
  4. Prior approaches are insufficient
  5. Design Space
  6. Measurement Methodology
  7. Simulation Method
  8. Evaluation Use Cases
  9. Reducing Capture Latency
  10. Constellation Orbital Configuration Examples
  11. Satellite Orbit Parameters
  12. Constraints of Different Orbital Configurations
  13. Reducing Transmission Latency
  14. Strawman Solution
  15. Our Approach
  16. ...and 11 more sections

Figures (30)

  • Figure 1: Event detection involves three latency components: capture, compute (not shown) transmission. Blue dot: satellite, blue line: satellite's orbit, yellow line: satellite's ground track.
  • Figure 2: In the existing Planet constellation, which comprises 160 satellites and 12 ground stations, the primary latency bottleneck is the capture latency, responsible for more than $90\%$ of the total end-to-end latency.
  • Figure 3: Nanosatellite constellation design space
  • Figure 4: We evaluate Gyrfalcon with six use cases with varying location distributions.
  • Figure 5: Orbital configuration visualization across constellations.
  • ...and 25 more figures