DEMONSTRATOR FOR LICENSE ASSISTED SPECTRUM ACCESS SATELLITE NETWORKS (ARTES AT 3A.077)

Description

Objective:

To design and build a License-assisted Spectrum Access (LSA) demonstrator that can exploit frequency sharing scenarios between satellite and other networks and radio services. To provide and trade off reference implementations of centralised versus distributed database-enabled LSA architectures in representative satellite operating environments.

Targeted Improvements:

  • Provide cost efficient and technically effective spectrum sharing between satellite and other network and radio services in case of primary/secondary, co-primary and GSO/NGSO sharing scenarios.
  • Enable satellite networks to access non-dedicated spectrum resources for future expansion opportunities.
  • Potential traffic increase up to 3 times respect to current traffic as extrapolated from current LSA implementation in 2.3GHz mobile terrestrial broadband networks.

Description:

Satcom and terrestrial wireless networks today are designedfor and operate in dedicated licensed spectrum. At the same time there are other spectrum usage authorization models, such asunlicensed spectrum access, or, as widely discussed currently but not yet implemented in practice, various forms of licensed shared spectrum. Hence, wireless technology as of today can only operate in a subset of the spectrum that is in principle available. Future satellite systems may benefit from the ability to access spectrum opportunities other than dedicated licensed spectrum. For example, in High Troughput Satellite (HTS) networks, the use case of Ka band shared between fixed terrestrial and satellite as well as between GSO/NGSO networks and the use of higher frequency bands such as Q/V/W as e.g., co-primary users, are important usage cases. Similarly, shared spectrum access can be considered for hierarchically organised satellite networks, constellations, smallsats, etc. Althoughsome additional ways of authorizing spectrum usage have been identified and deemed to become relevant in the future, i.e. Licenceassisted Spectrum Access (LSA), it remains important to analyze the resulting technical requirements and representative demonstrators.

Recent ARTES1 studies, i.e. Frequency Sharing techniques with other networks and radio services (FREESTONE), have looked at the sharing possibilities in S band, C band, and Ka bandfor HTS and between GSO/NGSO. Both technical and cost impacts have been assessed and critical issued identified for the bands mentioned. Scenarios of LSA techniques have been described. Other projects such as TRP ASPIM (Antennas and Signal Processing techniques for Interference Mitigation in next generation Ka band high throughput satellites) have proposed interference mitigation techniques applied at the terminal antenna that can be used alternatively or in combination with the licence-assisted techniques as proposed by Freestone.Satellite band sharing has been studied at EU level as well, i.e. FP7 CoRaSat (COgnitive RAdio for SAtellite Communications) project that focused exclusively on Ka band. CoRaSat however, did not focus on LSA techniques.

The present activity proposes the technology development and demonstration of LSA technique for future satellite communication networks. The activity proposes as a first step the database assisted implementation of LSA Proof of Concept (PoC) enabling the demonstration of various sharing scenarios. The proposed PoC shall consist of an integrated satellite terrestrial test bed and the implementation and the demonstration of LSA generic technology concept in combination with geo-location, satellite and terrestrial/satellite Carrier IDentifier (DVB-CID). As a second step, the activity shall propose selected usage areas (e.g. sharing scenarios in Ka-band, Q/V/W band) and the applied vertical use cases implementation and demonstration only the satellite components shallbe considered/accounted in this activity.

The activity shall detail the necessary procedures for the collaboration models between the frequency sharing networks trading-off i.e. centralised vvs distributed coordination entity, etc, that could be used to address the sharing scenarios, both horizontal (between primary users) and vertical (between primary and secondary users). The activity shall trade-off also centralized vs distributed database implementations. The prototype shall validate the procedures and assess performance in terms of Key Performance Indicators such as satellite network supported traffic increase, database reactivity time to minimisesystem outage

Tender Specifics