Deep space communication relay services under energy constraint with optimal power control

Extreme physical conditions in the deep space environment result in the severe challenge of unreliable deep-space data communications. Moreover, high data rate services such as Earth-Mar multimedia communication in space exploration applications consume significant amount of energy, while the limited battery energy storage forms another communication bottleneck. To overcome these challenges, we propose an algorithm to adaptively control transmission power in a two-hop relay Mars-Earth communication link, to improve end-to-end throughput performance while minimizing the energy consumption at different transmission stations. In the proposed approach, transmission power of each communication station is adaptively adjusted according the energy storage leftover at each node. To achieve such optimal power adaptation, energy budget constraint is considered in the overall optimization process. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed power control methodology can bring significant improvement of throughput performance to support traffic intensive multimedia applications by exploring the limited energy budget.