Decentralized Energy Management for Spacecraft Attitude Determination

Employment of wireless links for spacecraft onboard data communication provides promising solutions for improved modularity of onboard system architectures. In such onboard wireless network infrastructure power is highly distributed and often limited for some of the nodes that makes energy efficient data collection extremely important. Wireless technology can be specifically employed for sensors and actuators of attitude determination and control system (ADCS). In this paper we propose a new decentralized architectural scheme for energy management of onboard wireless sensors and actuators network (OWSAN). Our energy manager is based on a decentralized sensor scheduling. The local node energy managers dynamically schedule the sleep periods of wireless transmitters to lower the frequency of data communication activities which, as a consequence, reduces the energy consumption and minimizes the chances of communication collisions among the wireless nodes. The results of the simulation show about 25% to 33% reduction in wireless communication activities of some nodes without sacrificing the ADCS accuracy which implies a significant improvement in sensors energy efficiency.