Design techniques for on-board software of nano-satellites

This paper describe the design, implementation and testing of the flight software of ICUBE-1 which is a premier CubeSat of any institution in Pakistan. ICUBE-1 is scheduled to launch in 2^nd quarter of 2013. The ICUBE-1 fight software is developed to fulfill the main mission requirements, most important of which is to successfully establish the communication link with ICUBE-1 after launch and to receive the ICUBE-1 health data. This paper also describes the software architecture and design techniques used in the development of the flight software of ICUBE-1. Because of the usage of different Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) components in ICIBE-1, the software design & development team has not much liberty to use different software engineering principals. However, the ICUBE-1 has introduced the redundancy by design and other techniques to ensure the reliability of the software in-orbit. The paper also discusses the testing of the flight software while assuring the functioning as per the requirements.