Design of cutom wireless protocol for signal transmission inside space equipment

Abstract

There are many sensors and devices inside the satellite. All these devices need to communicate with each other, those devices can be sensor nodes or control device. According to current technology communication between different sensor nodes inside the satellite is wired, which adds the weight of the harness cable. It will be reliable if the communication between them is made wireless.

Protocol satisfying communication standards at low data rate and short range wireless networking must be developed. Protocol which is suitable to meet our requirements is available in the market in commercial packages, but the commercial standard devices cannot provide the efficient functionality in space as they are not resistant to the various radiation effects taking place in space. So our aim is to design a protocol in hardware description languages which can be embedded in radiation resistant series of space Grade FPGA. The baseband transceiver proposed in this thesis uses OQPSK modulation, Pseudo noise spread spectrum is used for coding and sinusoidal pulse shaping having theoretical bandwidth efficiency of 2bits/Hz same as QPSK and OQPSK is used for baseband processing. The transceiver is initially simulated in MATLAB Simulink and then in Verilog HDL by the MODELSIM simulator.