Power demands of communication technologies between LEO small-satellites are difficult to counterbalance by solar infeed and on-board battery storage, due to size and weight limitations. This makes the problem of battery-powered intersatellite communication a very difficult one. Its management requires a profound understanding as well as techniques for a proper extrapolation of the electric power budget as part of the inter-satellite and satellite-to-ground communication design. We discuss how the construction of contact plans in delay tolerant networking can profit from a sophisticated model of the on-board battery behavior. This model accounts for both nonlinearities in battery behavior as well as stochastic fluctuations in charge, so as to control the risk of battery depletion. We take an hypothetical Ulloriaq constellation based on the GOMX-4 satellites from GomSpace as a reference for our studies.

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The kinetic battery model is a popular model of the dynamic behavior of a conventional battery, useful to predict or optimize the time until battery depletion. The model however lacks certain obvious aspects of batteries in-the-wild, especially with respect to (i) the effects of random influences and (ii) the behavior when charging up to capacity bounds. This paper considers the kinetic battery model with bounded capacity in the context of piecewise constant yet random charging and discharging. The resulting model enables the timedependent evaluation of the risk of battery depletion. This is exemplified in a power dependability study of a nano satellite mission.

Power demands of communication technologies between LEO small-satellites are difficult to counterbalance by solar infeed and on-board battery storage, due to size and weight limitations. This makes the problem of battery-powered intersatellite communication a very difficult one. Its management requires a profound understanding as well as techniques for a proper extrapolation of the electric power budget as part of the inter-satellite and satellite-to-ground communication design. We discuss how the construction of contact plans in delay tolerant networking can profit from a sophisticated model of the on-board battery behavior. This model accounts for both nonlinearities in battery behavior as well as stochastic fluctuations in charge, so as to control the risk of battery depletion. We take an hypothetical Ulloriaq constellation based on the GOMX-4 satellites from GomSpace as a reference for our studies.