Development of cooperative communication techniques for a network of small satellites and CubeSats in deep space: The SOLARA/SARA test case

This paper aims to address this problem by proposing cooperative communication approaches in which multiple CubeSats communicate cooperatively together to improve the link performance with respect to the case of a single satellite transmitting. Three approaches are proposed: a beam-forming approach, a coding approach, and a network approach. The approaches are applied to the specific case of the SOLARA/SARA concept: a proposed constellation of CubeSats at the Lunar Lagrangian point L1 which aims to perform radio astronomy at very low frequencies (30 kHz to 3 MHz). The paper describes the development of the approaches, the simulation and a graphical user interface developed in Matlab which allows to perform trade-offs across multiple constellation׳s configurations.