SatNEx III - ESR "Executive Summary Report"

of satellites in future sensor networks" being part of the CoO-2 call of SatNEx III project (Task 2), commissioned by ESA in contract RFQ/3-12859/09/NL/CLP. The work primarily aimed at overviewing the current research activities performed in this field and then to investigate the potential applications that an integrated architecture constituted by sensor networks and satellite links may have in some satellite-based scenarios. Five scenarios have been investigated in terms of specific requirements and traffic characteristics; the traffic characteristics of the studied scenarios have allowed compressing the five original scenarios to three scenarios. All possible technologies (available at the writing time) usable in satellite and in sensor networks have been analyzed, together with techniques for data routing, clustering, data fusion, satellite access algorithms, data models for sensor network traffic. The performances of various aspects of the integrated system have been evaluated according to specific evaluation parameters. Distributed collaborative beamforming has also been studied, and security aspects both in WSNs, in satellite networks, and in hybrid WSN-satellite combinations have been deeply addressed. A new algorithm for intrusion resilience in unattended WSNs has been studied and evaluated. This document concludes summarizing the challenging research aspects that could be further investigated. All specific discussions and results are detailed in the Technical Notes (TN) listed as "Related documents". Each of these TNs contains hundreds of references to the literature.