Cost-Efficient Satellite Constellation Design by Network Reliability Analysis

The following paper presents a new payload optimization approach for a high cost-specific availability of satellite constellations developed in the course of the research project MiRel (Mission Reliability) by the Institute of Space System at Technische Universitat Braunschweig and SAREL Consult GmbH. The approach contains a dynamic reliability block diagram analysis in order to estimate the reliability of a constellation's point-to-point-connections and an importance analysis delivering critical components in communication payload architectures by investigating the processed data traffic of each payload component during mission duration. Both analyses have been developed by adapting current system safety assessments from commercial aviation. First results enable architectural optimizations by using single point-to-point connections. Future developments shall consider simultaneous global data traffic in order to identify bottleneck scenarios in global data management and provide representative optimization results for constellation operation.