Optimizing the CubeSat On-Board Computer Power Consumption Under Hard Real-Time Constraints

As the CubeSat concept became very popular among academia, business, and the military, its problems demanded solutions. The key challenge for the CubeSat avionics is its power budget and power consumption. The authors in the article provide a comprehensive overview of the existing solutions for power management via a satellite onboard computer (OBC) task scheduling and point out their limited use. At the same time, the authors concentrate on less widely described hybrid hardware and software methods of OBC power and frequency control. Using the developed by the authors OBC “Falco” which is based on Atmel’s ATSAMV71Q21B processor, the authors propose a mathematical model that helps to define and prove the potential power saving via the supply voltage and operation frequency control of the processor, namely Dynamic Frequency Scaling (DFS) and Run-To-the-Dark (RTD) methods. Via conducting the experiments, by computing a defined classical computation task at different supply voltages and operating frequencies of the OBC’s processor, the authors have defined a potential energy-saving range. Concluding the experiment with its results, the authors define the next steps that will combine an RTOS scheduling approach and the author’s DFS and RTD approach to potentially design a more overarching and efficient model for power saving. The key aim of the paper is to propose a method of optimization problem solving to determine the energy-efficient mode of the CubeSat on-board computer.