Regional LEO Satellite Constellation Design Based on User Requirements

Abstract

In the traditional satellite constellation design, it is hard to find a suitable method to evaluate the user requirements precisely and the existing algorithms result in a high computing cost. In this paper, a method of designing and optimizing the regional satellite constellation is proposed. The user requirements are represented by the the number of users, which is established based on communication markets and population distribution. The design of satellite constellations is a multi-objective problem, which can be solved through the proposed non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm with elitist strategy. By constructing a satellite constellation for the target area, the effectiveness of the method has been verified. The simulation results show that compared with OneWeb constellation, the proposed constellation design method can effectively meet the user requirements with lower satellite cost.