Large-scale space projects rely on a thorough Assembly, Integration, and Verification (AIV) process to provide the upmost reliability to spacecraft. While this has not traditionally been the case with CubeSats, their increasing role in space science and technology has led to new verification approaches, including in educational CubeSats. This work describes the integration and verification approach for ISTSat-1, which is an educational CubeSat from the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal that partially discards the typical stage-gate approach to spacecraft development in favor of a more iterative approach, allowing for the system-level verification of unfinished prototypes. Early verification included software functional testing on a flatsat model, thermal vacuum and vibration testing on a battery model, ionizing radiation testing on the on-board computer, and non-ionizing radiation (EMC) testing on all subsystems. The testing of functional prototypes at an early development stage led to uncovering system-level errors that would typically require hardware redesign at a later project stage. The team considers the approach to be useful for educational projects that employ a small, co-located team with low non-recurring engineering costs.

The main goal of this work is to characterise communications through body area networks (BANs), analysing how the human body affects wireless links qualities. 802.15.4 MICAz motes were deployed on seven on-body locations of four volunteers and a test-dummy. The quality of the communications was monitored in order to study the channel behaviour. Results show that the human body clearly modifies communication properties, introducing attenuations of up to 26 dB. Differences between male and female subjects were found to be unimportant. Body posture affects the performance, mainly because of body shadowing. LoS together with the channels dynamic nature are key issues to achieve connectivity. Power settings and the local environment also influence the BANs performance.

Combining wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with delay-tolerant networking (DTN) has the potential to extend their use in a multitude of previously impossible applications. However, and despite numerous proposed solutions, there is still wide debate as to how to best route messages in these networks and, more importantly, how to do it in an energy-efficient way. This paper proposes CHARON (Convergent Hybrid-replication Approach to Routing in Opportunistic Networks), an approach that focuses on maximizing efficiency in addition to delivery statistics. CHARON uses delay as a routing metric, and provides basic QoS mechanisms, with both a quasi-single-copy mode for general traffic and a multi-copy mode for urgent data. It also integrates time synchronization and radio power management mechanisms. Simulation results show that it is able to achieve good delivery statistics with lower overhead than comparable solutions.

A flexible Wireless Sensor Network platform has been developed and deployed at the Instituto Superior Tecnico/Technical University of Lisbon (IST-TUL). This test-bed integrates multiple projects into a single network, creating an expandable platform that facilitates future developments. To achieve this flexibility, a dedicated framework was developed, enabling fine-grained parameter control and application programmability through a centralised configuration panel. On top of this platform, four applications have been developed and currently coexist within the network, illustrating the new platform's capabilities. The article discusses the test-bed architecture and deployment challenges, as well as the environmental interaction and vibration monitoring applications. An experimental evaluation of these applications' capacity limits and performance shows that in-network processing must be used with the vibration monitoring application to avoid congestion collapse. Furthermore, a minimum amount of time is needed to complete processing tasks with the Environmental Interaction Application (approximately 200 ms in our test topology).