Efficient Ground Station Network scheduling to support a nano-satellite constellation

With the lowering cost of designing, building, and launching satellites, constellations are becoming increasingly popular as a method to support newly found business models. While they provide capabilities that are impossible to achieve with a single satellite, they also come with a host of operational complications: in this thesis, the problem of optimally scheduling the communication between satellites and ground stations is explored. Three solutions to this problem are proposed, comparing their strengths and limitations. The algorithms show good performance when tested in real-worlds scenarios, managing to increase communication times with a constellation, as well as other metrics such as network latency.