Multi-Link Iridium Satellite Data Communication System

iii To my caring parents who are my inspiration To my graduate advisor who is a remarkable mentor iv Acknowledgements I would like to extend my sincere and utmost gratitude to Dr. Victor Frost, my advisor and committee chair for his invaluable guidance and inspiration throughout my research. I would like to thank him for giving me the opportunity to work on this project, which is his brainchild. I would also like to thank Dr. Glenn Prescott and Dr. Chris Allen for being on my committee and helping me solve some of the technical problems faced during my research. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Tory Akins and the entire Greenland field team for their support during the field experiments, without which this work would not have been possible. Thanks are due to Dennis Sundermeyer who helped me with the packaging of the system and carrying out field experiments. I would like to thank Brett Becker for his help with the network design and his support throughout my research. Thanks are also due to Dan Depardo, who helped me with the setup in the wireless lab and provided valuable suggestions. I extend a special note of thanks to my friends, Nandish Chalishazar and Radha Krishna Mukkai for providing the much needed help during the Greenland experiments. I would like to express my gratitude to all my friends at KU for their moral support. Abstract Data and Internet access are integral for the success of any field research. The current state-of-the-art communication facilities, besides their wide penetration are still not available in many geographically remote regions including the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Research in the Polar Region involving data collection and telemetry has grown significantly over past few years. The commercial broadband satellite systems do not provide coverage at higher latitudes. The current geo-synchronous NASA satellites providing broadband access to Polar research have a limited visibility window at poles and need extremely large field equipment. Hence the need for a reliable, portable and easily available data/Internet access system is clearly evident. In this thesis, we present an Iridium based data communication system that can provide round the clock coverage from pole-to-pole. Since the Iridium satellite system provides a low bandwidth that is not sufficient to support most of the data applications, inverse multiplexing technique is used to combine multiple satellite links into a single logical channel of aggregate …