On the Structural Robustness Assessment of Wireless Communication Systems for Intra-Satellite Applications

When a system has been designed to be robust against other phenomena different than ionizing radiation, it is possible that the robustness introduced by design in its structure may also make it tolerate some radiation effects. The present work explores how to exploit the self-correcting features that transmitter-receiver systems have for correcting channel-induced errors, in order to optimally design a radiation-tolerant wireless communications system for intra-satellite communication. A wireless transceiver is a good example of how to proceed to design a system that has some inherent robustness by itself, so fewer protections are needed when hardening it against radiation. The assessment is made using a fault injection technique, where the figure assessed is the transmission Frame Error Rate (FER) instead of the typical cycle-by-cycle comparison with a theoretical, or golden, bit sequence. This assessment allows the designer to optimally protect the transceiver, reducing mitigation area overhead with respect to full and selective Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) schemas. The technique has been applied to the design of a wireless transmitter, reducing the area overhead required to harden it against Single Event Upsets (SEU), compared with traditional full and selective TMR schemes.