SatNEx III - SR "Summary Report"

The aim of this document is to summarize the main results achieved in the study "The role 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. This analysis primarily aimed to overview 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 performance evaluations of various aspects of the integrated system have been done according to well-defined 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 the specific discussions and results are detailed in the relevant Technical Note (TN) cited in the text and that constitute the references of this report. In the mentioned TNs, the papers related to the single aspects are listed.