ESA participates in Future Internet activities with new study

 “The integration of satcom within Future Internet (FI) networks is a very challenging task,” explains Maria Guta, ESA’s technical officer responsible for the study. “Satellite technology has the potential to play an important role in FI development and deployment by providing essential functions such as large coverage areas, flexible bandwidth allocation, and dynamic multicasting/broadcasting capability.”

Future Internet is a summarising term for worldwide research activities dedicated to the evolution of the current Internet. The current Internet, designed 40 years ago, is increasingly being used as the most important technical infrastructure providing the means for universal communication and computation.

An increased awareness of several critical shortcomings in terms of performance, reliability, scalability, security and many other categories including societal, economical and business aspects, has led to Future Internet research efforts. For example, the European Commission supports the FP7 Federating Research Theme on Future Internet (FI)–Challenge 1, the Future Internet Research & Experimentation Initiative (FIRE) and the Future Internet –Public Private Partnership Initiative. In the US, the Future InterNet Design (FIND) Initiative and the Global Environment for Networking.

Currently, Internet traffic is being driven by the introduction of new content intensive services such as VoIP, VoD, and video streaming which trigger and force new requirements on the underlying network and its architectures. Consistent trends agree that the Internet traffic volume per month is expected to increase by 50%. Additionally, the latest CISCO Visual Networking Index reports that projected video traffic will account for 90% of the global consumer traffic in 2014 and the mobile data will increase 39 times between 2009 and 2014 with 60% of that being video. 

“This research identifies a significant change of the Internet structure, as a new core of interconnected content and consumers network appear, combined with new commercial models between content and consumers as well as with a dramatic improvement in capacity and performance,” explains Guta. “The Future Internet architecture should be sufficiently agile to seamlessly accommodate such demanding services requirements.”

This ARTES 1 study will be performed by Space Hellas S.A (GR) and supported by the Athens University of Economics and Business–Research Centre (GR) and Thales Alenia Space (FR).

The Ï•SAT project shall provide results to both satellite and terrestrial audiences. With such an approach, it is expected that both the terrestrial and satellite industry will mutually benefit from:

  • Dissemination of possible new satcom technologies to support FI amongst the telco operators, service providers, and manufacturers by bringing forth the strategic role that satellites can play in the Future Internet. By doing so ESA will be helping to create interest towards integrated networks solutions among the terrestrial networks’ community.
  • Satellite actors learning from the wide range of experience of terrestrial operators and manufacturers in the development of Future Internet technology and economic models by trying to make satellite services more efficient so the satellite component becomes a seamlessly integrated component of the FI terrestrial network.

Ï•SAT is expected to cast further light on the added value of satcom integration within Future Internet Networks and provide a technology development roadmap and recommendations for future activities.

For more information on Future Internet, see the links located in the column to the right.

Published 01 September 2011
Last updated at 06 August 2014 - 10:38