Emerging Trends of Space-Based Wireless Sensor Network and Its Applications

Abstract

There is a great demand in space and earth observations applications. Traditional satellite missions have complex design architecture involving high cost in design, operation, launch and maintenance. Thus single large satellite is replaced by multiple, small satellites with distributed network, collaboratively performing the same functionality of large satellite. This has been motivated researchers to explore the application of terrestrial Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) to space. The main objective of using space based WSN is to have full power of remote sensing capabilities at all the relevant time horizons and geographical scales with high performance and low cost. It also strives for an optimal solution that gratifies the standards, sizes, air interfaces, network architecture, access schemes, fault tolerance, operating system, hardware components of on-board diagnostics etc. This chapter discusses the characteristics and challenges of Space-Based Wireless Sensor Network (SWSN).