Very Low Latency Architecture for Earth Observation Satellite Onboard Data Handling, Compression, and Encryption

In modern society, the ever-increasing demand for Earth Observation products in a large variety of sectors is exposing the limitations of traditional satellite data chain architectures. The European Union Horizon 2020 EO-ALERT project aims at overcoming the existing bottlenecks by leveraging the performance of state-of-the-art commercial off-the-shelf devices to move the critical elements of data processing on the flight segment without sacrificing processing performance. This paper introduces the architecture of the EO-ALERT CPU Scheduling, Compression, Encryption and Data Handling Subsystem, responsible for coordinating the onboard optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar data chains, as well as providing data compression, encryption, and storage services. The performance obtained by a reference implementation of the proposed architecture is also presented, showing an extremely low contribution to the overall system latency that allows real-time Earth Observation product delivery to the end user in less than 5 min.