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High Throughput Decoders (Direct to Home System Demonstrator for High Throughput Multimedia Applications)

Performance

The activity shall study, develop and validate the system and key technologies for the next generation of high speed (up to 400 Mbaud) IP based broadcasting in future Ka band or Q/V bands satellite systems with transponder bandwidth up to 500 MHz.

The current scenario of broadcasted services is mainly Standard (SDTV) and High Definition TV (HDTV) on a saturated 36MHz Ku-band transponder using the DVB-S2 modulation standard, reaching up to 60-80 Mbaud. The maximum corresponding user data rate therefore around 100-150 Mbps. The current technology broadcast services in Ka-band are foreseen as a multi-carrier operation of the wideband transponder. Supporting larger bandwidth broadcast carriers will result in the following benefits:

•  single carrier operation of future wideband transponders with a gain of 1-3 dB in output power and
• to increase the number of channels that the consumer can receive as well as support bandwidth hungry applications such as 3DTV. Additionally the DVB-S2 standard may need to be adapted to efficiently support very high rates by including new features.

The activity is planned in 2 phases.

Phase 1 will start with the definition/extension of the advanced broadcasting multimedia services by particularly targeting the following aspects:

• High channel baud rate (up to 400 Mbaud) and max data rate up to 1.5 Gbps
• Support of high order modulations (up to 16 APSK) and a modified DVB−S2 air interface for a reduced complexity implementation (time slicing) and heavy fading environment (extended MODCOD set, constant framing with Variable Coding and Modulation –VCM-)
• Video/IPTV broadcast services: Combining in only one channel low and high resolution TV and on demand video streaming in conjunction with Scalable Video Coding (SVC). This phase will end with the architectural design of the modulator and demodulator prototypes.

Phase 2 shall complete the detailed design of the prototypes and carry out the implementation. Efficient and fast processing architectures (parallelization, multi-cores) will be considered together with the maximum exploitation of COTS and fast prototyping platforms (FPGA) to reduce the cost of the prototype. Laboratory tests with a realistic Ka and Q/V channel emulator (can be provided by ESA upon request) shall be defined and preformed. High throughput multimedia applications shall also be demonstrated. The prototype shall include all the functionalities of commercial equipments and shall support a modified air DVB−S2 air interface (extended set of MODCODs, constant framing for VCM, time slicing), RX self equalization and TX pre-distortion.

Partners
Fraunhofer HHI
SES
Newtec
IZT GmbH
WORK Microwave