Free-Placement Optimization of Ground Station Locations for Low-Earth Orbit Satellites
A new method called SCORE (Sequential Cyclic Optimization via Refinement & Evaluation) has been developed for optimizing the placement of ground stations for low-Earth orbit satellite constellations. This method operates on a continuous spatial domain, allowing for more flexible and potentially higher-throughput configurations compared to traditional fixed-site approaches. Tests on commercial and synthetic constellations demonstrated that SCORE can improve downlink throughput by up to 13% with significantly fewer function evaluations than existing methods, while also exploring trade-offs between new infrastructure and existing sites. AI