# Assessing the Capacity and Coverage of Satellite IoT for Developing Countries Using a CubeSat
## 2 Mission Concept  
Considering the KITSUNE mission in LEO, the communication time between the GSTs and the satellite could be estimated for a single satellite in orbit. However, the potential capacity of the SIoT mission without limiting to a single satellite could be evaluated based on the constellation configuration, distribution of Ground Stations (GSs) and GSTs, and the communication capability as listed below:  
* The number of satellites in orbit, number of orbital planes, elevation angle, orbital plane spacing and orbital eccentricity for continuous data reception from GSTs and relaying to multiple ground stations if a constellation is employed considering global coverage and target application scenarios [29,30].
* The number of GSTs in optimized locations for maximizing ground coverage of each GST [31,32].
* Number of geographically distributed ground stations capable of downloading the data from the satellites and forwarding it to a database accessible by the users [33].
* Interlink capability of satellites in a constellation to relay the data to ground stations for lower latency in data retrieval from the GSTs [34].
* The uplink and downlink capability of the satellites and the GSTs, which depend on the communication frequency, data rates, transmit power and receiver sensitivities.  
The full capacity of SIoT that provides continuous coverage almost in real time could be realized by using multiple GSTs that transmit the data to a constellation of satellites communicating with each other and distributed ground stations, in order to minimize the latency time. Furthermore, the ground stations forward data to a common database that is accessible to the users as illustrated in Figure 2(a).  
In this paper, an SIoT mission considering a single satellite, KITSUNE, with 11 geographically distributed GSTs and one ground station capable of downloading the data is proposed as shown in Figure 2(b). A single satellite is incapable of providing continuous coverage, but it could be employed for delay-tolerant applications (DTA).  
Figure 3: _Cont._  
The proposed method is targeted towards offering a low-cost solution to developing countries and collaborative capacity-building programs such as the utilization of Ki-boCUBE, which considers a piggyback launch to the International Space Station (ISS) [35]. Therefore, the methods for optimizing the coverage performance by using a minimum number of satellites in a LEO constellation as in [23; 36; 37] are not applicable to this study since it only uses a single satellite at ISS orbit. Furthermore, the variation of the coverage and capacity in different latitudes have been shown through a metric of coverage degree and IoT device density [36]. Therefore, there are multiple aspects to accomplish the full capacity of an IoT mission considering the space-segment and the ground-segment simultaneously. In this study, the choice of orbital parameters is limited to orbital inclination of 51.6\({}^{\circ}\) and altitude of approximately 400 km as in KITSUNE satellite. The idea of the proposed method is not to launch a constellation of satellites to achieve continuous coverage. Instead, it is critical to prove that a CubeSat mission could help to collect data from remote locations in developing countries, which could be a significant step towards capacity building and space utilization as a demonstration mission.