PAGE CONTENTS
Objectives
Despite a rich history of successful experimentations, the on-board processing (OBP) technologies have not gained significant industry support for notable commercial deployments.
A regenerative OBP’s technology and transmission formats, having to be pre-selected at payload design, could likely lose optimality due to getting outdated, by the time it gets into in orbit operation, causing unacceptable waste of operators’ investment.
Hence, this study is to more closely review the key issues and identify architectural remedies using the emerging technologies that allow generic OBP designs which can be re-programmed in-orbit for more efficient and flexible operation.
The key objectives of the study were:
- Review lessons from previous OBP experience, analyze the technologies have been used, and benefits they have provided, and provide a breakdown of the different types of OBP technology used e.g. regenerative or transparent and the reason for their choice;
- Assess market demand for OBP systems by examining, among other things, the number of future commercial and institutional SATCOM missions planned for the next 20 years and identify the ones that will use OBP technologies, and investigate requirements for OBP applications from commercial and institutional users;
- Identify OBP payload architecture that would provide flexibility, higher capacity, scalability etc to meet the application requirements for the short, medium and long term, investigate the overall system architecture including the space and ground segment based on the OBP payloads identified, study the technology that would be needed to realize the OBP payloads identified, and develop a vision of the applications and services that will be possible with the novel OBP payloads identified above;
- provide recommendations for future concept, applications, services and technology developments for space, ground segment for short, medium, and long term missions deploying OBP payloads and outline a roadmap for their development.
Challenges
This project has been to address the constraints posed mainly by the rigid structure of the traditional regenerative OBPs. However, some other issues affecting OBP’s commercial viability, such as market needs and cost/performance ratio as compared to traditional bent-pipe carriage have also been addressed; mesh networking advantage does not adequately compensate for the large difference in throughput cost, especially that mesh traffic currently constitutes a small fraction of the total traffic.
The project has also examined some challenging technical issues presented by ground segment technology developments for use in higher frequency bands (e.g., Q/V) and multi-spot-beam future networks.
Plan
he project plan comprised the following tasks:
Task 1 assessed the roles, potential benefits and technology trends for both regenerative and transparent OBPs.
Task 2 provided market assessments for OBP systems over the next two decades, including requirements from commercial and institutional users.
Task 3 provided for the architectural design and technologies selection for the two identified missions, as briefly described above.
Tasks 4 and 5 were concerned with technology developments and a roadmap that will ensure sustainable synergies among network constituents for cost-effective solutions, especially when using higher frequency bands (e.g., Q/V) and multi-spot-beam configurations.
Current Status
This project has already been finalized, fully achieving all its objectives, as summarized in the above items.
