Project Vista: Adapting LoRa Ground Stations for Low-latency Imaging and Inference from LoRa-enabled CubeSats



We present Vista, a communication system that adapts encoding onboard the CubeSat and decoding configuration on commercial LoRa ground stations to allow images to be communicated. We perform a detailed evaluation of Vista by leveraging wireless channel measurements from a recent CubeSat (2021), and show that Vista can achieve 55.55% lower latency in retrieving data with 12.02 dB improvement in packet retrieval in the presence of terrestrial interference. We then evaluate Vista on a case study on land-use classification over images transmitted over the CubeSat link to further demonstrate a 4.56 dB improvement in image PSNR and 1.38× increase in classification accuracy over baseline approaches.

Citation

  • Adapting LoRa Ground Stations for Low-latency Imaging and Inference from LoRa-enabled CubeSats, Akshay Gadre, Zachary Machester, and Swarun Kumar, ACM ToSN 2024