Re:SpaceX's Valuation Climbs to $25B with New Funding Round
by elihu on Friday April 13, 2018 @02:48AM
(#16827636)
That might be a pretty good option just from a protocol overhead standpoint.
Maybe there are good technical solutions to this that I don't know about, but I'm inclined to believe that a satellite could communicate more efficiently with a handful of high-throughput ground stations at once than it could hundreds or thousands of smaller ground stations that are continually connecting and disconnecting as they gain or lose line-of-sight. That's a lot of control messages to deal with.
Maybe there are good technical solutions to this that I don't know about, but I'm inclined to believe that a satellite could communicate more efficiently with a handful of high-throughput ground stations at once than it could hundreds or thousands of smaller ground stations that are continually connecting and disconnecting as they gain or lose line-of-sight. That's a lot of control messages to deal with.