Recent development of technologies and methodologies on distributed spacecraft systems enable the small satellite network systems by supporting integrated navigation, communications and control tasks. The distributed sensing data can be communicated and processed autonomously among the network systems. Due to the size, density and dynamic factors of small satellite networks, the traditional network communication framework is not well suited for distributed small satellites. The paper proposes a novel swarm intelligence based networking framework by using Ant colony optimization. The proposed network framework enables self-adaptive routing, communications and network reconstructions among small satellites. The simulation results show our framework is suitable for dynamic factors in distributed small satellite systems. The proposed schemes are adaptive and scalable to network topology and achieve good performance in different network scenarios.
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