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Dove High Speed Downlink System PDF
Dove High Speed Downlink System PDF
Dove High Speed Downlink System PDF
ABSTRACT
Planet’s mission is to monitor global change by imaging the entire Earth every day. To achieve this objective,
Planet has launched over 250 satellites and built the mission control and ground station infrastructure to
autonomously monitor and control the satellites and download their data. Historically, CubeSat radios have
been downlink limited because of size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints. Planet has overcome the
downlink data rate limitation by optimizing every part of the radio communication system to achieve over
220 Mbps peak and 160 Mbps average data throughput.
This paper presents an overview of the latest generation compact, low-mass, and low-power High Speed
Downlink (HSD) radio that was built and deployed on over 100 3U form-factor Dove satellites that form
Planet’s Mission 1 constellation. The HSD operates at X-band and is built using commercial-off-the-shelf
(COTS) parts with a high-gain spacecraft antenna and reasonably sized ground station antennas (4.5m -
7.6m diameter reflector). Planet’s X-band ground station network includes 22 active dishes across 8 sites
located around the world. Commercial standards, such as the DVB-S2 modulation and coding suite, have
been used where appropriate. The latest generation HSD system is capable of providing downlink volumes
of 12-15 GB during a single ground station pass, which has a duration of 7 to 10 minutes. Some lessons
learned along the way are presented as Planet transitioned from building and operating a few prototypes to
a production constellation of over 100 satellites and 22 active ground stations.
The high-speed downlink transmitter, shown in fig- Receiver design is arguably a much more difficult un-
ure 2, consists of a conventional x86 CPU, an FPGA dertaking than building a transmitter. Fortunately,
housing a DVB-S2 modulation core, and a chain of the market is saturated with DVB-S2 receiver prod-
analog RF components. The vast majority of the ucts ranging from low-cost TV tuner cards to higher
modulation complexity is contained within the com- performance rack-mounted solutions. Most of these
mercial DVB-S2 modulator core. Planet’s propri- products are intended for use with conventional geosyn-
etary packet format is encapsulated within raw DVB- chronous communication satellites and typically ex-
S2 baseband frames. The modulated digital data pect L-band RF input. A X-band to L-band down-
from the FPGA is converted to baseband using a converter at the antenna feedpoint is used at the
high speed digital to analog converter (DAC) and a ground stations to adapt these receivers to Planet’s
superheterodyne transmitter is used to convert the specific spectrum allocation.
baseband signal to X-band. The final stage power
In addition to providing decoded baseband frames,
amplifier produces 2 W RF power which is transmit-
the receiver also provides a variety of statistics about
ted to the ground stations using a high gain right
reception conditions including the Signal to Noise Ra-
hand circular polarized helical antenna with 12 dBi
tio (SNR) and link margin. The ground stations run a
gain.
proprietary adaptive coding and modulation (ACM)
algorithm that is used to maintain adequate link mar-
gin between the satellite and the ground station (fig-
ure 3. At roughly 1 second intervals, this algorithm
assesses link margin and sends a message on the high-
speed uplink (HSU) to the satellite to adjust up or
down in rate depending on the link conditions.
18
17 try in data rates. The uplink rate is 250 kbps while
16
15 the downlink rate can exceed 200 Mbps. Because of
14 this asymmetry, traditional transport protocols like
13
12 TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) are inefficient
250
200 for bulk data transfer. A proprietary protocol was de-
Rate (Mbps)
2016-06-21
HSD gen 1, 75%
HSD gen 1, 90%
150 HSD gen 2, 25%
t
S Rollou
HSD gen 2, 50%
Downlink Rate (Mbps)
70 MSP
Commissioning &
100 Nominal Ops
conflicts
e ncy
effici
e r at ionailzations
Op optim
50
Nov
Feb
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
Jan
Mar
Feb
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Dec
Jan
Apr
May
Jun
2016 2017
Figure 8: Data rate quantiles for HSD1 and HSD2 annotated with key milestones,
aggregated monthly.
5 TB
F2P (12) SSO
2015-10-05
2016-06-21
2017-02-25
4 TB
Daily Downlink Volume
3 TB
100
80
ing
60
ion
iss P
mm F3
40
20
Co
0 Apr Jul Oct Jan Apr Jul Oct Jan Apr Jul
2016 2017
Figure 9: (Top) Constellation-wide daily downlink data volume with key launch dates.
(Bottom) Number of active satellites.
The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of [1] “FCC Online Table of Frequency
former Planeteers Helen Lurie, Henry Hallam, Matthew Allocations”, 47 C.F.R. 2.106,
Peddie, Hua Tang, and Chris McClelland who worked https://transition.fcc.gov/oet/spectrum/table/
on various aspects of the high speed downlink sys- fcctable.pdf
tem.
[2] ETSI EN 302 307 V1.2.1, 2009-08 Digital Video
Broadcasting (DVB); Second generation fram-
ing structure, channel coding and modulation
systems for Broadcasting, Interactive Services,
News Gathering and other broadband satellite
applications (DVB-S2).
[3] Klofas, Bryan. “Planet Labs Ground Station
Network.” Presented at the 13th Annual Cube-
Sat Developers Workshop. San Luis Obispo, CA.
April 2016.
[4] Colton K., Klofas B. “Supporting the Flock:
Building a Ground Station Network for Auton-
omy and Reliability.” In Proceedings of the 30th
Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satel-
lites. SSC16–IX–05. Logan, Utah. August 2016.
[5] Klofas B. “Table of CubeSat Communica-
tion Systems.” http://www.klofas.com/comm-
table/. Accessed 6/10/2017.