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UTMBeam

Ultra High Throughput Multi-Spot Beam Networks

The project is an ESA ARTES 5.1 funded project

The current activity intends to analyze the techniques at the ground segment for broadband GEO satellite services to fixed stations targeting near terabit per second system capacity in the 2020 timeframe.

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In order to reach ultra high capacity, these systems shall exploit as much bandwidth as possible in the user links, and dual polarization at the system level.

In addition, higher aggregate capacity can be offered through extensive frequency reuse thanks to increased number of beams coverage. However, increasing the number of beams would result in a beam size in the order of few tenths of degree, therefore in the same order of magnitude of current achievable beam pointing stability. This will cause large fluctuation over time of the beam coverage over the service area so requiring mitigation measures.

Due to regulation constraints, irregular frequency reuse may be necessary. In high traffic areas, hot spots at higher frequencies such as Q/V band may be implemented.

These trends have several major implications. Among them:

1. Due to the platform power constraints, an EIRP density lower than more traditional systems will be available;
2. Due to the large total bandwidth used in the system, a high number of gateways are required thus increasing the ground segment CAPEX and OPEX costs. A way to reduce the required number of Gateway Stations would be to move the feeder links to higher frequency bands such as Q\V band or even optical, where more band is available;
3. Gateway equipment must be able to support high frequency bands, possibly multi frequency bands for frequency diversity, and dual polarization support, and extremely high processing throughput;
4. The large number of Gateways in the system will require efficient multi gateway architecture.
5. Gateways, NCC and NMS shall be scalable and multi-service;
6. Gateway interconnectivity and backhauling shall support higher throughputs and future terrestrial networks backbone based on only IP based architectures.
7. User Terminals will be required to support higher modulation and demodulation symbol rates, support of dual polarizations and wider bandwidth possibly with fast agility; UT is a consumer product and therefore costs shall be kept as low as possible.
8. At Q/V band frequencies the fading events in the feeder link will cause large capacity fluctuations and will jeopardize the link availability if proper countermeasures are not adopted.
9. In order to reduce the ground segment cost but in the meantime to counteract feeder link impairments, effective FMTs must be implemented;
10. The activity shall be focused on ground segment technologies and techniques to support such ultra high capacity systems and address the deriving implications.

Objective

The objective of the activity is to:

1. Review technologies and techniques relevant to the ground segment of future ultra high capacity fixed broadband satellite systems, such as smart gateway diversity, interference cancellation with carrier overlapping, with full frequency reuse, etc.
2. Analyze the impact of these techniques on the future Ground Segment networks and products for each established system scenarios.
3. Define a Technology Roadmap for the introduction of the proposed technology.

Partners

Avanti Communications Group PLC
German Aerospace Center
STM Norway AS