Toward Autonomous Cooperation in Heterogeneous Nanosatellite Constellations Using Dynamic Graph Neural Networks

The upcoming landscape of Earth Observation missions will defined by networked heterogeneous nanosatellite constellations required to meet strict mission requirements, such as revisit times and spatial resolution. However, scheduling satellite communications in these satellite networks through efficiently creating a global satellite Contact Plan (CP) is a complex task, with current solutions requiring ground-based coordination or being limited by onboard computational resources. The paper proposes a novel approach to overcome these challenges by modeling the constellations and CP as dynamic networks and employing graph-based techniques. The proposed method utilizes a state-of-the-art dynamic graph neural network to evaluate the performance of a given CP and update it using a heuristic algorithm based on simulated annealing. The trained neural network can predict the network delay with a mean absolute error of 3.6 minutes. Simulation results show that the proposed method can successfully design a contact plan for large satellite networks, improving the delay by 29.1%, similar to a traditional approach, while performing the objective evaluations 20x faster.