ICARUS—Very Low Power Satellite-Based IoT

The ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) satellite IoT system was launched in 2020 to observe the life of animals on Earth: their migratory routes, living conditions, and causes of death. These findings will aid species conservation, protect ecosystem services by animals, measure weather and climate, and help forecast the spread of infectious zoonotic diseases and possibly natural disasters. The aim of this article is to explain the system design of ICARUS. Essential components are ‘wearables for wildlife’, miniature on-animal sensors, quantifying the health of animals and the surrounding environment on the move, and transmitting artificially intelligent summaries of these data globally. We introduce a new class of Internet-of-things (IoT) waveforms—the random-access, very-low-power, wide-area networks (RA-vLPWANs) which enable uncoordinated multiple access at very-low-signal power and low-signal-to-noise ratios. RA-vLPWANs used in ICARUS solve the problems hampering conventional low-power wide area network (LPWAN) IoT systems when applied to space communications. Prominent LPWANs are LoRA, SigFox, MIOTY, ESSA, NB-IoT (5G), or SCADA. Hardware and antenna aspects in the ground and the space segment are given to explain practical system constraints.