2006 International Workshop on Satellite and Space Communications (IWSSC2006)
14th-15th September 2006, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés, Spain

 

 

Tutorial 1: Slides  

IP in Space - Selected Topics on Network Architecture and Management

Klaus-Peter Doerpelkus

Cisco Systems

 

 

Date: 9:00-10:30. September 14th, 2006

Location: Sala Audiovisuales, Biblioteca

Tutorial 2: Slides

Software radio in space segment: applications, technologies, reconfiguration management and architectures

Catherine Morlet

ESA’s Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC)

 

Date:  9:00-10:30. September 14th, 2006

Location: Sala Reuniones, Biblioteca

Tutorial 3: Slides

QoS Support on DVB-S2/RCS: IP-friendly Cross-Layer Approaches

María Ángeles Vázquez Castro

Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona

 

Date: 11:00-12:30. September 14th, 2006

Location: Sala Audiovisuales, Biblioteca

Tutorial 4: Slides

Advanced propagation models studied within SatNEx for adaptive satcom systems at Ka and Q/V bands

Laurent Castanet

ONERA Toulouse

 

Date:  9:00-10:30. September 14th, 2006

Location: Sala Reuniones, Biblioteca

 


Tutorial 1

IP in Space - Selected Topics on Network Architecture and Management

Klaus-Peter Doerpelkus

 

Abstract

IP is the 'glue' that allows building converged architectures for data, voice and video applications. While this is especially true for the Internet and terrestrial networks used in enterprises and e.g. governments - in both civil as well as military applications - "IP in Space" is still in it's infancy. Some benefits of using IP (and "commercial-of-the-shelf" COTS technologies) in space are obvious (lower mission cost, new concepts of operation, interoperability, access to to all kind of broadband services for anybody, anytime, anywhere ...) there are also technical challenges caused by e.g. protocol design and network control and management.

The lecture will address some of the protocol issues (TCP and PEPs, mobility, routing in space) as well as end-to-end concepts (QoS, management etc) for space-based networks and networks that contain space segements.

 

CV

Dr. Klaus-Peter Doerpelkus is the „Space Initiatives Manager for Europe and Emerging Markets (E&EM)” of Cisco Systems’ „Global Defense, Space and Security Group“ (GDSS). As part of Cisco Systems’ “Global Government Solutions Group” (GGSG), GDSS works with leading partner companies, integrators and their public and private sector defense and space customers to identify and meet their advanced technology solution needs in an increasingly network-centric world.

Dr. Doerpelkus joined Cisco Systems in 1997 and started the development of strategic alliances for Cisco Systems in Europe. In 1999 he started and ran merger, acquisition and investment activities for Cisco Systems in E&EM. In early 2002 he joined GDSS and became responsible for building strategic alliances in the defense and space sector in E&EM, before taking his current position in early 2004.

Prior to joining Cisco Systems, Dr. Doerpelkus worked for the communications and networking branch of the German technology conglomerate Siemens AG in Munich. From 1987 he worked in hardware and software engineering, product management and marketing. He left Siemens AG as Director of Marketing in 1997.

Dr. Doerpelkus studied physics with a specialization in theoretical particle physics and quantum optics and received a diploma degree in 1983 and a “Doctor of Science” degree in 1987, both from the University of Technology RWTH in Aachen, Germany.

 

Contact

Dr. Klaus-P. Dörpelkus

Space Initiatives Europe & Emerging Markets

Global Defense, Space and Security

Cisco Systems Inc.

 

Phone: +49 (0) 811 - 554 3112

Fax: +49 (0) 89 - 7499 7048

kdoerpel@cisco.com

http://www.cisco.com/go/space

 

Mail address:

Cisco Systems GmbH

Airport Business Centre

Am Soeldnermoos 17

D-85399 Hallbergmoos

Germany


Tutorial 2

Software radio in space segment: applications, technologies, reconfiguration management and architectures

Catherine Morlet

 

Abstract

With the introduction of new services requiring higher data rates and wider bandwidth and standard evolutions, satellites can play a major role as they offer a large coverage with a short deployment time. This deployment is even shorter when a limited ground segment has to be deployed in parallel, which is more likely to be the case with regenerative payloads. However these complex payloads perform numerous on-board treatments that reduce significantly the system flexibility. Ensuring new applications development by a reconfiguration of the satellite mission during its lifetime (on the order of 15 years for a GEO) becomes then difficult. For those reasons satellites operators are reluctant to use regenerative processors and still prefer enhanced transparent architectures that appear to be more flexible. A way to alleviate the rigidity of regenerative satellite payloads is the use of software radio technology emerged from military research. Since 1980’s lot of studies have been done in terrestrial segment to introduce a high degree of flexibility in the network mainly for 3G and beyond systems where there is constant need for the introduction of new services and software radio is a key element of this flexibility. Software radio refers to various techniques enabling the reconfiguration of a communication system without having to change any hardware device. Thus it is of great interest in the digital communication domain, especially for satellite payloads that are not anymore accessible when the satellite is launched. Software radio is of particular interest for:

  • Improving the functionalities of a payload/repeater
  • Introducing standard updates
  • Modifying the mission of a payload/repeater
  • Introducing new concepts

Software radio addresses mainly digital equipments of the satellite payload but numerous challenging techniques are also concerned like the partition between the analogue and digital baseband, ADC converters performances, technologies for space segment, the configuration process and management, etc.

This tutorial will present how software defined radio can be implemented in the space segment, especially for telecommunication applications, detailing applications and functionalities suited to such kind of technology, the reconfigurable hardware/software devices applicable in space, the methodology of reconfiguration and the payload architectures.

Content:

  • Applications of software radio technology
    • Motivations for the space segment
    • Applications and functions
  • Reconfigurable technologies
    • Radiations
    • FPGA
    • Processor arrays
  • Reconfiguration methodology
    • Protocols
    • Security
  • Architectures
    • Regenerative repeaters
    • Reconfiguration management

 

CV

Catherine Morlet received the engineering degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (ENST), Paris, France, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. From October 2000 to July 2003, she was with Alcatel Space, Toulouse, France, where she worked in the Research Department as a Research Engineer in the digital on-board processing section. She was mainly in charge of activities dealing with advanced coding schemes, synchronization for low signal-to-noise ratios and adaptive waveforms, and software radio applied to space telecommunication payloads. In August 2003, she joined the ESA’s Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), Noordwijk, The Netherlands, where she is currently a Communication System Engineer. Her interests are mainly in advanced on-board processors, software radio technology, broadband and mobile systems (especially DVB-RCS and beyond 3G scenarios), and cross-layer optimization.

 

Contact

Dr. Catherine Morlet

catherine.morlet@esa.int

Communication System Engineer (TEC-ETC)

Phone: (31) 71 565 6754

Fax: (31) 71 565 4596

ESTEC - Keplerlaan 1 - P.O. Box 299 - 2200 AG Noordwijk ZH

The Netherlands


Tutorial 3

QoS Support on DVB-S2/RCS: IP-friendly Cross-Layer Approaches

María Ángeles Vázquez Castro

 

Abstract

The rapid growth of Internet-related multimedia services has placed an enormous strain towards an optimal usage of the wireless time-variant capacity. DVB-S2 adaptive physical layer allows achieving near-Shannon capacity at the physical layer thus providing significant capacity gains with respect to using fixed physical layer. However, such gains may be lost if higher layers do no adapt coherently to the physical layer dynamics. In addition, different delay requirements of multimedia traffic requiring QoS provision introduce the well-known capacity-delay trade-off, which can be addressed with a proper design of the upper layers.

This tutorial focuses on the design of an interactive Multibeam Broadband Satellite (MBS) system with QoS support. A DVB-S2/RCS transparent architecture and fixed terminals using adaptive physical layer will be considered. DVB-S2 transmission power and symbol rate are assumed to be constant, and hence ACM (Adaptive Coding and Modulation) yields a bit rate that is time and space dependant according to the channel conditions. DVB-RCS transmission power is assumed to be constant and DRA (Dynamic Rate Adaptation) along with AC (Adaptive Coding) yield both bit and symbol rate time and space dependant. During the tutorial, a number of cross-layer mechanisms will be introduced whereby the physical, the Medium Access Control (MAC) and the IP layers share knowledge of the channel dynamics in presence of ACM. The cross-layer design approach allows further improvements on packet data admission, scheduling and policing to maximize both capacity and user satisfaction while meeting QoS constraints.

 

CV

María Ángeles Vázquez Castro (M’99) was born in Vigo, Spain. She received the M.S. degree in Telecommunications Engineering in 1994 and the PhD degree (cum Laude) in 1998 from University of Vigo. She has been an Assistant Professor at the University Carlos III de Madrid from 1998 to 2001. She was a guest researcher at University of Southern California in 2000. From 2002 to 2004 she was an internal Research Fellow at the European Space Research and Technology Center (ESTEC), European Space Agency, Noordwijk, The Netherlands, working on DVB-S2 with the Communications Section. She is currently Associate Professor at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona leading the Wireless Communications Research Group, which has been recently awarded by the Catalonian Government as emergent research group. Her group is member of the European Network of Excellence on Satellite Communications SATNEX. She has lead and participated in several national and international research projects most of them related to both terrestrial and satellite communications. She has published more than 60 papers on international journals and conferences and holds one patent of a packet scheduler. Her current areas of interest are related to satellite communications networking cross-layer design and optimization.

 

Contact

María Ángeles Vázquez Castro, PhD

Associate Professor

Dpt. Telecommunications and Systems Engineering

Engineering School

Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona

Bellaterra 08193 – Barcelona, Spain

Phone: +34 93 581 4246

Fax: +34 93 581 4031

E-mail: angeles.vazquez@uab.es


Tutorial 4

Advanced propagation models studied within SatNEx for adaptive satcom systems at Ka and Q/V bands

Laurent Castanet

 

 

Abstract

After years of growth associated with the expansion of the telecommunication market, the Fixed Satellite Service is now facing new challenges. First of all, except in countries where the terrestrial infrastructure is not completely developed, the market is now dominated by terrestrial networks and the satellite can rely essentially on its broadcast or multicast capability. Afterwards, the saturation of the radiowave spectrum pushes the regulator (ITU) to impose complex co-ordination procedures between new systems operating at conventional frequency bands such as C-band or Ku-band to prevent interference. Finally, there are strong needs from the end user to manipulate multimedia information and therefore high data rates that require wider bandwidths. All these challenges lead to the use of higher frequency bands such as Ka-band (20-30 GHz) or Q/V-band (40-50 GHz), so far more or less free, in which wider bandwidths are still available.

However, these high frequency bands suffer from some limitations such as the lack of maturity of the technology, high intra-system interference (co-channel) due to the use of multi-beam antennas and strong propagation impairments such as: attenuation due to oxygen, water vapour, clouds and especially rain, scintillation in both clear sky and rain conditions, as well as depolarisation due to rain and ice. These propagation impairments result in a lower system availability if systems are designed in the same way as in C-band or in Ku-band. If this lower availability can be acceptable for some applications such as file transfer or e-mail, this is not the case for interactive services such as videoconferencing or other applications.

In order to provide a sufficient availability on the end-user point of view, to optimise system capacity and to offer a quality of service similar to terrestrial networks, new satcom systems have to be adaptive in order to match traffic and/or propagation conditions, thanks to the use of Fade Mitigation Techniques with Adaptive Resource Management. In order to design these techniques and their associated access protocols and to minimise intra-system interference, complex system simulation is needed.

To carry out the optimisation process, traffic and channel models are required. As far as propagation models are concerned, the available statistical methods, which allow distributions of propagation effects to be predicted are not sufficient anymore and a fine description of the temporal and of the spatial behaviour of the propagation channel is needed.

The objective of this tutorial is to describe recent activities carried out in this field especially within the Network of Excellence SatNEx. In a first part, the temporal behaviour of the propagation channel is addressed thanks to the use of time series synthesisers. In a second part, it is shown how space variation of propagation impairments is described with the development of generators of rain attenuation fields. Then, the hot topic of the space-time variability of the propagation channel is introduced, which is the objective of actual work carried out within SatNEx.

 

CV

Dr. Laurent Castanet works as research engineer in the radiowave propagation field at ONERA Toulouse. His main research interests are Earth-Space propagation (dynamics and spatial variability of the propagation channel, development and validation of propagation models) and Fade Mitigation Techniques (design and performance simulation). He is involved in propagation and FMT studies for satellite telecommunications systems at Ku, Ka and Q/Vbands in the framework of space industry, CNES, ESA and EU projects. He has participated to the design of the STENTOR EHF propagation payload and on the preparation of several propagation experiments (e.g., EXPRESS). He has been a French expert in the COST 255 and COST 280 European projects. Laurent Castanet is involved in the European Network of Excellence "SatNEx", in which he chairs the propagation joint action, He is also a French representative in ITU-R Study Group 3 which deals with radiowave propagation.

 

Contact

Dr. Laurent Castanet

Laurent.Castanet@onera.fr

2 avenue Edouard Belin

31055 TOULOUSE cedex 4

France

Phone: +33 5 6225 2729

Fax: +33 5 6225 2577

 

 


Last updated: 21 June 2006