A Geometric Compression Method Using Dominant Points for Transmission to LEO Satellites

In the operation of a low earth orbit satellite, a series of antenna commands are transmitted from a ground station to the satellite within a visibility window (i.e., the time period for which an antenna of the satellite is visible from the station) and executed to control the antenna. The window is a limited resource where all data transmission is carried out. Therefore, minimizing the transmission time for the antenna commands by reducing the data size is necessary in order to provide more time for the transmission of other data. In this paper, we propose a geometric compression method based on B-spline curve fitting using dominant points in order to compactly represent the antenna commands. We transform the problem of command size reduction into a geometric problem that is relatively easier to deal with. The command data are interpreted as points in a 2D space. The geometric properties of the data distribution are considered to determine the optimal parameters for a curve approximating the data with sufficient accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to conventional methods currently used in practice.