An efficient utilization of intermittent surface–satellite optical links by using mass storage device embedded in satellites

Recently, earth observation system by using satellite network has attracted much attention due to its wide coverage and disaster resistance. Although the system is useful for collecting various data, which have an effect on a natural disaster, ecology and so forth, earth observation satellite hardly send the collected observation data to the ground station. This is because that the earth observation satellite needs to orbit near surface of the earth to get high-precision data, and it limited the time that can be used to send the observed data traffic to the ground station. Additionally, the amount of the observed data drastically increase in these days. Thus, we focus on the data relay satellite using optical communication in this network. By relaying observed data to traffic to the relay satellite, which has geostationary orbit, it is possible to increase the chance of sending data for the observation satellite due to the wide coverage of the relay satellite. In addition, laser light that is used in optical communication in satellite network has high frequency and it can deliver large data compared with radio wave. However, laser light is greatly influenced by atmosphere, and optical link capacity between satellite and ground station drastically changes according to weather condition. Therefore, we propose a new data traffic control method to use the network constructed by satellites which has mass storage device effectively according to the condition of optical downlink between satellite and optical ground station. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated with numerical result.