Description
The objective of this activity to design, develop and test a gateway prototype able to establish synchronization with M2M terminalsusing low cost oscillators and to define a suitable forward link M2M air interface.
Targeted Improvements: Enabling technology on the Gateway to simplify the design of the M2M terminals and thus reduce their production costs.
Description: Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications means the automated or requested exchange of information among smart devices and/or control remote units withoutor with very limited human intervention.
M2M and Internet-of-Things communication scenarios impose new requirements on satellite solutions to address this market. End user devices will need to be extremely small, will have only very limited power but along lifetime. Furthermore, due to the costs requirements, these devices will only have limited oscillator stability and antenna accommodation capabilities.
Requirements for such applications and system scenarios have been gathered and will be defined by ESA at initiation ofthe activity.
Classical VSAT solutions for resource allocation based on demand assignment are clearly not adequate for this type oftraffic which also demands very low cost terminals.
Very efficient random access protocols have been recently developedand validated, like the Enhanced Spread Spectrum ALOHA (E-SSA) solution. The E-SSA novelty lies on the packet detector design exploiting an iterative Successive Interference Cancelation (iSIC) approach customized to the asynchronous access protocol. The advanced detector located at the hub is the heart of the system, as it has to provide reliable detection of the incoming packets even under heavy MAC channel load conditions and with arbitrary packets power distribution.
Despite the very good random access achievable throughput, the gateway demodulator available so far is able to cope with only about ±1%xFsym (few kHz) of frequency uncertainty. This requires the M2M terminal to derive an accurate carrier frequency reference extracted from the downlink high baud rate carrier or froma GPS receiver.
The aim of this activity is to design, develop and test a gateway demonstrator able to establish synchronizationwith M2M terminals subject to large carrier frequency offsets, doppler variation and phase noise, thus allowing their design simplification and cost manufacturing reduction.
The activity will include the design of suitable forward link M2M air interface.
The deliverables shall include:
- A gateway able to operate in a M2M satellite network in the presence of large carrier frequency offsets (±20%xFsym), Doppler rate variations and excessive carrier phase noise.
- Analysis and development of specific synchronization algorithms in orderto guarantee the correct detection of M2M traffic, as well as to allow the relaxation on the transmission carrier stability.
- Design of a light outbound air interface to minimize the data exchange traffic towards the M2M terminals. This will be instrumental to reduce the needed link margin in order to enable the usage of compact antennas (i.e., reduced G/T in the forward link transmissions).
- Implementation of an emulation platform able to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed forward link air interface, and the applicability of these advanced synchronization algorithms to a simplified satellite system environment with low-cost M2M terminals.
Tender Specifics