HIGH THROUGHPUT DIGITAL BROADCASTING SATELLITE SYSTEMS (ARTES AT 3A.073) (RE-ISSUE OF ITT 1-8522)

Description

The objective of this activity is to demonstrate the feasibility of techniques and technologies that can significantly reduce the total cost of video content delivery via satellite to the end users while improving flexibility, service quality, and the users experience in a real time platform, representing realistic system scenarios.

Targeted Improvements: The target gain is to demonstrate and quantify the performance gain of payload, system and ground component techniques that can together enable significant improvements (more than twofold) in the content delivery capacity ofdigital broadcasting satellites, in comparison to conventional state-of theart solutions. The goal is to demonstrate a combinationof such techniques working together in a real-time platform (preferably taking advantage of the existing space assets), to deliver a higher capacity under a set of system constraints (such as available power and/or bandwidth).

Description: Starting from the outcome of previous ARTES studies, this activity aims to demonstrate measurable enhancements in quality, performance and flexibility offered by innovative techniques and technologies both at the ground segment and system level. It also aims to assess the feasibility of proposed techniques in a representative system set-up.

The goal is to provide convincing evidence to the stakeholders of the benefits which would allow to significantly improve the competitive advantage of direct broadcasting satellites. This activity is meant to improve the maturity and the technology readiness level of promising solutions that are identified in other previous or on-going TRP and ARTES projects.

The first part of this activity will focus on selecting relevant techniques (inputs from other activities) that have reached a level of maturity to be included in an end-to-end system demonstrator platform. Consolidating the results of previous activities and complementing them with relevant technologies and techniques to demonstrate how to achieve the above objectives.

The end-to-end demonstrator shall combine several techniques such as: Exploitation of regional/linguistic beams/multi-beam in the conventional Ku-band frequency and higher (Ka-band broadcasting); Increased frequency/polarization reuse; Reduction of orbital spacing for coordinated fleets by implementing interference mitigation techniques; A Higher EIRP Density/higher order modulations for broadcasting; Seamless reduction of video quality in case of fading to reduce the static link margin using VCM or Hierarchical Modulation (and SVC); Higher efficiency video encoder (HEVC) Adaptive link margin control based on return channel feedback; Minimum SNR maximization techniques at the transmitter of a multibeam broadcasting systems; Enhanced multiplexing and transport protocols such as GSE-Lite; Exploitation of residual capacity for terminals in more favorite position.

The benefits shall be quantified according to pre-selected figures of merit in comparison to a benchmark conventional system. The activity shall establish a set of representative scenarios and consolidate the results for the identified technology showcases for presentation and demonstration to key players in satellite broadcasting segment.

Tender Specifics