PAGE CONTENTS
Objectives
Multi-beam satellite systems at Ka Band can provide broadband high capacity access to interactive multimedia services with a good compromise between complexity and cost. It is also well known that the traffic profile tends to be asymmetric from the user point of view, with dynamic behaviour increasing daily and higher levels of QoS being demanded.
For this reason, means to increase system efficiency in support of the demanding dynamic traffic conditions are a key aspect to increasing system competitiveness whilst keeping its quality. On the other hand, the DVB-S2 standard is recognized as providing adaptability to propagation conditions, supporting higher transmission efficiency and dedicating more resources (bandwidth and/or power) to the users able to use them.
In order to cope with this situation, the present project is intended to investigate a solution based on beam hopping techniques, consisting of the illumination of only a subset of the satellite beams through an appropriately designed beam illumination pattern.
The challenge is to satisfy as close as possible the beam traffic requests, maximizing revenues through provision of high capacity in those areas of the coverage region with high demand, and minimizing the amount of resources dedicated to low loaded regions.
As such, the focus of this activity is to fulfil the following objectives:
- Deeply investigate and assess the potential of beam hopping at system and payload levels,
- Define payload architectures suitable for beam hopping systems,
- Study, analyse and optimize beam hopping techniques in multibeam broadband satellite systems. The benefits in terms of capacity and system flexibility compared to conventional system architectures shall be assessed through detailed system simulations,
- Compare the achieved performance with the one provided under the same conditions by system configurations, where no beam hopping, but an ad-hoc bandwidth/power allocation is utilized.
Challenges
Assessment of the benefits of beam hopping techniques in order to improve the use of the satellite resources in a more efficient way.
Plan
The project is composed of three tasks:
- Task 1: It consists of the consolidation of the system scenarios. This shall include applying of a set of traffic distributions, defining a few system study cases, including both non-beam and beam hopping systems, which shall be in-depth optimized and analyzed in the following tasks. Preliminary payload architectures shall be identified and defined for each system study case, which will be used as input for the optimization and system modelling tasks.
- Task 2: The system performances for the non beam hopping study cases shall be derived. To this aim, a methodology for the complex problem of system optimization (bandwidth and power allocation, etc) shall be studied, implemented and validated in a software simulation tool.
- Task 3: The system performances for beam hopping system study cases shall be derived. A similar methodology for the complex problem of system optimization in case of beam hopping shall be studied, implemented and validated in the software simulation tool. Comparison between non beam hopping and beam hopping study cases will be carried out, assessing the gain resulting from the use of beam hopping techniques.
