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Feihong Dong 1,2 and Qinfei Huang 3 and Hongjun Li 1,2 and Bo Kong 1 and Wei Zhang 1
Academic Editor:Didier Le Ruyet
1, College of Communications Engineering, PLA UST, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210007, China
2, Institute of China Electronic System Engineering Corporation, Beijing 100141, China
3, Beijing Capital Highway Development Group Co. Ltd., Beijing 100078, China
Received 26 July 2015; Accepted 27 October 2015; 24 November 2015
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Wireless M2M networks supporting M2M-enabled machine devices are pivotal to the success of M2M. Sensor nodes in wireless M2M networks could be connected by a wide range of wireless network technologies, for example, satellite networks, especially the latest space information networks (SINs). With the developing of satellite transmission technologies, the SIN has been playing a more important role in the M2M backbone network than ever. As one of the trends in the future satellite networks, distributed satellite cluster network (DSCN) recently has drawn more and more attention. Many distributed satellite clusters (DSCs) have been deployed by some demonstrations, such as F6 (Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying) Program, Techsat-21, and 3CSat (Three-Corner Satellite) [1-3]. DSC refers to a number of satellites that distribute on the same or adjacent orbit position. The satellites in one or adjacent DSCs cooperate to achieve a particular mission and intercommunicate with each other through intersatellite links. In general, DSC is also referred to as payload distributed communication satellite system (DCSS), distributed space system (DSS), and fractionated spacecraft clusters (FSCs) [4].
With respect to flexibility and robustness, satellites with traditional configurations, that is, monolithic satellites, are associated with more uncertainty than DSCs. The flexibility and robustness for monolithic satellites can only be improved with novel operations. If a monolithic satellite fails, the feasible method to continue the missions carried on the defunct satellite would be launching a new satellite.
The problems that the monolithic satellite has to face mainly include the following:
(1) The increasing transmission requirement of M2M terminals leads to a speedy increasing of payload, which is impossible to be met by a single monolithic satellite platform.
(2) The orbital slots...