1. MSCA Mobility rule
To be eligible for this PhD position, applicants must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in the country of their first recruiting beneficiary (France or Germany) for more than 12 months during the 36 months immediately preceding the recruitment date — unless this period was part of a compulsory national service or a procedure for obtaining refugee status under the Geneva Convention.
2. Description of the Work Project
Earth observation and monitoring satellites have become strategic assets for many key areas such as
agriculture and environmental public policy. The observation data are handled on board the satellites
by the so-called payload data handling and transmission (PDHT) subsystems, which are responsible
for storing and forwarding the information to ground data centres for further processing and
evaluation. The growing number of missions launched to provide Earth observation and monitoring
services, together with the time-critical nature of data access, calls for a fundamental rethinking of
the ground segment infrastructure. Whereas past missions were generally designed with dedicated
ground infrastructures, a recent trend often referred to as Ground Segment as a Service (GSaaS)
promotes the mutualization of ground assets among multiple missions. This approach allows mission
operators to contract providers with existing global infrastructures, enabling significant capital
expenditure savings and optimizing the use of ground stations. However, allocating ground segment
resources under time and capacity constraints has become an increasingly complex problem given
the ever-growing number of missions. Expanding the network with new ground segment sites to
meet capacity demands is not a viable solution due to geographical, political, economic, and technical
(e.g., interference) limitations. In this context, advanced real-time scheduling solutions must be developed
to ensure that the service level agreements (SLAs) of the missions, such as required uplink
and downlink data rates or the availability of contact windows, are fulfilled with the existing ground
infrastructure. Consequently, this project aims to develop satellite range scheduling solutions for
multi-mission ground segments dedicated to LEO/MEO Earth observation and monitoring systems.
Unlike previous studies, this work will incorporate various ground antenna technologies (e.g., steerable
reflectors, small- and large-scale sparse phased arrays) to thoroughly assess their impact on resource
allocation. The potential of MIMO technology to enhance access to scarce spectrum resources
will also be evaluated. The work will deliver an optimization framework for ground segment design
that balances resource constraints with the need for resilient operations.
3. Core activities
- Definition of representative scenarios for multi-mission ground segments operating in the S-, X-, and/or Ka-bands for Earth observation and monitoring missions, including the specification of required data rates, quality-of-service parameters, and data flow prioritization for Earth–space and space–Earth links
- Development of optimization methods for the efficient dimensioning of multi-mission ground segments, aimed at ensuring sustainable and resilient support for increasing data traffic demands
Research field:
- Electrical engineering,
- Communication engineering
Required skills:
- Optimization tools
- Wireless communication systems,
- Numerical simulation programming (e.g., Python, Matlab, C++, …)
4. Recruitment and secondment plan:
