RESOURCE MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES FOR SATELLITE SYSTEMS BASED ON ACTIVE ANTENNA (ARTES AT 3A.107)

Description

The objective of the activity is to develop resource management techniques capable of exploiting active antennas to maximise the system throughput bycontinuously matching the distribution of the satellite capacity on ground to the geographic distribution of the traffic demand and following its variationsin time. The activity will develop a system demonstrator to validate the techniques and to assess their performance.

Targeted Improvements:Doubling the system throughput.

Description: Active antennas and large on-board processors are giving birth to a new generation of commercial Very High Throughput Systems (VHTS) as confirmed by the recent announcements of new systems. The combination of both unleashes unprecedented flexibility that renders obsolete any known resource management strategy.

State-of-the-art strategies first allocate the system's resources at beam level based on their individual aggregated traffic and then, in a second stage, theyfurther allot each beam's resources to its users at packet level. The allocation of resources at beam level assumes a static beam layout and typically tracks the slow day-night variation of the traffic. On the other hand, the packet scheduler allots resources in real-time yet constrained by the resourcespreviously made available to each beam.

Active antennas and large on-board processors break completely this paradigm and enable a much greater level of flexibility. Unlikeexisting systems,they allow to adapt carriers, beam layout and power levels on a packet-by-packet basis. Current state-of-the-art resource management paradigms cannotexploit this flexibility and new algorithms are therefore needed.

This activity will develop new resourcemanagement strategies for satellite systems based on active antennas and on-board processors. The activity willdevelop algorithms to determine the optimal set of users to be served at a given instant, the optimal carrier plan (number, bandwidth and power) and thebeamforming coefficients. The algorithms will be implemented and validated in a software system demonstrator. The new approach will look formatching the capacity offered by the satellite to the geographical distribution of the demand to improve the system's throughput. Impact at system andair interface levels will also be part of the activity.

Tender Specifics