The European Telecommunications Satellite Organization (EUTELSAT IGO) is an intergovernmental organisation consisting of 49 member states. It is headquartered in Paris, France. The mission of EUTELSAT IGO is to maintain the rights to use radio frequencies and orbital locations which were assigned collectively to the Member States by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and to oversee the operations of Eutelsat S.A. so as to ensure that the company complies with the international EUTELSAT Convention. EUTELSAT IGO plays an active role within the global telecommunications community and is a key actor in the satellite business sector.A.A.A.A.A.A..
Cost of in-orbit capacity is an important element to take into account when ordering new satellites in order to remain competitive with terrestrial-based solutions.This can be achieved by minimizing the size, weight, and power consumption (SWaP), volume, reducing spacecraft AIT, etc. Properties of photonics components makes them a natural candidate while designing future generation Satcom payloads.Photonic components offer the advantage of minimizing the SWaP of satellite communication payload and are capable of offering a limitless bandwidth in THz range at around 1550 nm wavelength.Light weight and low volume photonic components offer almost lossless propagation in an optical fibre within a spacecraft and immunity to Electromagnetic Interference (EMI).With the advancement of photonic technology, it is now possible to develop Tbps-like software defined photonic payload of high data rates and frequencies with almost lossless propagation in an optical fibre.However, at present in the satcom industry only a few demonstrations of photonic devices in non-critical equipment with limited degree of integration can be found.This paper presents a space-based photo-digital communication payload called PhLEXSAT and shows how the advantages offered by photonics can be utilized in increasing the capacity of Very High Throughput Satellites (VHTS) while reducing the cost at the same time.PhLEXSAT is a Ka/Q/V/W band communication system that will use novel optical devices for space-based systems, these are currently under design and development stage.The architecture incorporates advanced broadband photonic ADC and photonic DAC with digital processing firmware with a high degree of miniaturization and power-consumption efficiency.This design will be suitable for future Terabit per second satellites.PhLEXSAT project is focusing on the advancement of these key photonic technologies to develop a photo-digital channelizer for flexible HTS.
Convolutional turbo codes are very flexible codes, easily adaptable to a large range of data block sizes and coding rates. This is the main reason for their being adopted in the DVB standard for Return Channel via Satellite (DVB-RCS). The paper presents the turbo coding/decoding scheme specified in this standard, for twelve block sizes and seven coding rates. Simulation results show the performance of the coding scheme chosen, in particular for the transmission of ATM cells and MPEG transport stream packets. The company TurboConcept has developed a hardware prototype for the double purpose of very low error rate performance measurement and demonstrates the hardware feasibility of this new turbo code. Some hardware measurement results are also discussed.
The EUTELTRACS two-way Mobile Satellite Messaging and Automatic Satellite Position Reporting (ASPR) service is Europe's first commercially operated Mobile Satellite Service. It was introduced by the European Telecommunications Satellite Organization (EUTELSAT) for commercial service in 1991. The system is based on a centralized network architecture organized around a single hub station operated by EUTELSAT. Initially the system was designed with a close user group architecture enabling a mobile user to communicate exclusively with its own headquarters. This paper describes the new applications (design and tests prior to their introduction into service) especially developed for the European market and particularly the Double Hop Services opening the system to authorized external entities. In addition, the European Commission (EC) pilot demonstrations in which the EUTELTRACS system is involved are described.
