VERY LOW LATENCY ARCHITECTURE FOR EARTH OBSERVATION SATELLITE ONBOARD DATA HANDLING, COMPRESSION, AND ENCRYPTION

VERY LOW LATENCY ARCHITECTURE FOR EARTH OBSERVATION SATELLITE ONBOARD DATA HANDLING, COMPRESSION, AND ENCRYPTION

Michele Caon, Paolo Motto Ros, Maurizio Martina, Tiziano Bianchi, Enrico Magli,

Politecnico di Torino, Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Turin, Italy

Francisco Membibre, Alexis Ramos, Antonio Latorre, Murray Kerry,

Deimos Space S.L.U, Madrid, Spain

Stefan Wiehle, Helko Breit, Dominik Günzel, Srikanth Mandapati, Ulrich Balss and Björn Tingsz

German Aerospace Center (DLR), Cologne, Germany

Abstract

In modern society, the ever-increasing demand for Earth Observation products in a large variety of sectors is exposing the limitations of traditional satellite data chain architectures. The European Union Horizon 2020 EO-ALERT project aims at overcoming the existing bottlenecks by leveraging the performance of state of the art commercial off-the-shelf devices to move the critical elements of data processing on the flight segment without sacrificing the processing performance. This paper introduces the architecture of the EO-ALERT CPU Scheduling, Compression, Encryption and Data Handling Subsystem, responsible for coordinating the entire onboard optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar data chains, as well as providing data compression, encryption, and storage services. The performance obtained by a reference implementation of the proposed architecture is also presented, showing an extremely low contribution to the overall system latency, thus allowing true real-time Earth Observation product delivery to the end-user in less than 5 min.