Design and Development of a Wireless Sensors Network for Telemetry Acquisition in Space Launcher Applications

In the aerospace field, weight reduction is of paramount importance. The main objective of this PhD work, in collaboration with ASI (Agenzia spaziale italiana) and TEMIS s.r.l., was to de- velop a novel wireless sensor network to acquire telemetry data in aerospace environments. Wireless sensing introduces many advantages with respect to the use of wired sensors, such as less costs deriving from less weight, and flexibility in arranging sensors also in places where wires cannot be placed. Additionally, another advantage pertains to reconfigurability; wire- less sensors can be relocated to different positions without incurring the substantial costs and time required for changing cable deployment. Anyway, some drawbacks have to be managed, like, for example, batteries that need to satisfy a good trade-off between energy budget and size, which again means increasing weight. Furthermore, wireless propagation effects need to be compensated for, especially if one considers transmission of information in an arduous environment such as that of a launcher. Different protocols for WPAN (wireless personal area network) were analyzed to find the most suitable for this application, focusing on high throughput, low latency, and power consumption. Among them, IEEE 802.15.4 and 802.11ah standards have been taken into account, performing a large analysis using evalua- tion boards (EVBs) and simulations, including the development of a modified 11ah simulator, adapted to the objective application. The main network parameters were optimized, such as latency distribution, throughput, packet loss ratio, and energy consumption. This led to the design of custom hardware, tested to verify the expected behavior obtained from extensive simulations.