Task Allocation for Real-time Earth Observation Service with LEO Satellites

Traditional Earth observation (EO) services using satellites mainly observe relatively large-scale objects for applications with no or weak real-time requirements. The rapid development of Low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites opens new opportunities to provide EO services for a much wider range of applications by collecting the observation and communication capability of many LEO satellites. The challenge is how to select and coordinate the LEO satellites to accomplish the EO task subject to strong real-time constraints. In this work, we present a holistic solution that precisely models the observation service of a single LEO satellite and allocates the work of a periodic real-time EO task to a group of LEO satellites to meet the real-time requirements. Experiments were conducted to evaluate how the parameters of the LEO satellites and the ground stations impact the satisfiability of real-time requirements. The results provide valuable guidelines for designing LEO satellites and ground stations to provide real-time object observation services.