Simulation and Performance of Delta Modulator for CubeSat-Based Communications

Satellite communications have taken on an important role in today’s society, due to their ability to provide telecommunications services to remote and hard-to-reach areas. Consequently, the complexity of these systems has been increasing not only in terms of the physical layer but also the logical layer. Leveraging the advantages provided by digital processing, in various telecommunications scenarios, the possibility of developing a robust software-based layer has been proposed. This implies that the study and simulation of algorithms applied at all stages of the transmission chain have become significantly important. The main focus of the study of data processing algorithms in satellites has been on the communication stages that require greater capacity and resources in data management. One of these stages is analogue-to-digital conversion, where the process of transforming the original information source into the binary form to be manipulated by the rest of the system is carried out, as this transformation determines the functioning of the subsequent stages of the communications system. This work aims to study the delta modulation algorithm, as it is one of the most widely used sampling and quantisation techniques in wireless communication systems, with the purpose of understanding its behaviour in satellite telemetry transmission scenarios.