Maintaining Satellite Coverage in Uncertain Operational Environments

The primary objective of the proposed work is to develop a distributed algorithm embedded with capabilities of verifying and localizing coverage hole in a satellite (i.e., sensor) networks without the availability of metric information. Emphasis will be put on developing coverage verification and hole localization techniques for situations where only information about the pairwise relationships between satellites is available. More precisely, each satellite only “knows� which other satellites are within its proximity (i.e., neighborhood relationship), but not the relative distance and direction between them. Despite the nature of such course information, tools from algebraic topology (e.g., simplicial-complex based models and it first homology), optimization, and systems theory will be leveraged to enhance coverage capabilities of satellite networks. These methods will be extended to address satellite spatial coverage problems.