Blockchain Applied In Decentralization of Ground Stations To Educational Nanosatellites

Space has increasingly attracted the attention of governments, large industries, and universities. One of the most popular strategies in recent years has been the adoption of nanosatellites to fulfill different missions, which can work alone or in constellations. Universities stand out among the agents launching nanosatellites, with more than 600 launches until 2022. Given the growth of entities that control space missions, it is necessary to implement new methods for communication between control and satellite to accelerate data transmission and provide a high-security degree. Our work proposes a consortium archi-tecture between Ground Stations (GSs) so that a GS as a Service (GSaaS) works with low cost, reliability, and resource sharing. We simulated a nanosatellite mission in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) with MATLAB to obtain the parameters of average communication time, propagation loss, and at which angles the communication would be most affected by atmospheric phenomena. Then, we implement business rules for communication between GS and satellites using smart contract concepts. We set up a blockchain to provide the decentralization infrastructure and created a web service to provide a communication API between nanosatellite and blockchain. We simulated the firmware update process, showing that the nanosatellite took around 20 minutes to request all 32-byte fragments of 301 Kb firmware. Considering the time interval that the communication window between GS and nanosatellite remains active, the entire firmware transmission takes two to three communication slots. However, the transmission time is drastically reduced in a scenario with two or more GSs. Furthermore, the GSaaS decentralized infrastructure allows the consortium of GSs to communicate agnostically with the satellites, preserving firmware privacy due to the cryptography used in blockchain transactions