ESA CGD - Prototype of a Centralized Broadband Gateway for Precoded Multi-beam Networks

Prototype of a Centralized Broadband Gateway for Precoded Multi-beam Networks (CGD)

Founding Source: ESA – European Space Agency
Partner: SnT (Prime), SES

Precoding techniques have been demonstrated to be able to increase the throughput of Very-High Throughput Satellite (VHTS) systems. The best performance can be obtained when there is only one central entity in the network in charge of precoding all user carriers. This architecture fits particularly well within a centralized gateway concept, where all digital baseband processes are implemented in a remote server connected via high speed fibers to the distributed remote gateways responsible for the downlink and uplink of the satellite radio frequency signals.Furthermore, the aforementioned centralized architecture represents a promising solution to deal with the bandwidth requirements of the feeder link, which increases proportionally with the frequency reuse in the user link.  By deploying several gateways, the available spectrum for the feeder link can be reused among spatially separated gateways through very directive antennas.

In this activity a prototype of a centralized gateway for a broadband satellite network will be designed and tested. In particular, this activity focuses on the technical challenges of a centralized precoding design, which are summarized below:

• Multicast scheduler optimization,
• Network time and frequency synchronization,
• Feeder link Doppler pre-compensation,
• Precoding matrix computation and implementation complexity optimization,
• Impact of non-linear distortions.

All these issues constitute open questions that have to be properly addressed by modelling and simulations in order to assess their performance benefits and impacts.

Fig. 1. Simplified scheme of a centralized broadband gateway for precoded multi-beam system

 

Project Partners:

• SES, Luxembourg (https://www.ses.com/)

Research Team

• Dr Symeon Chatzinotas – Project Manager
• Dr Eva Lagunas – Technical Contact Point
• Dr Juan M. Duncan – Lab Coordinator
• Dr Jorge Luis Gonzalez (SnT)
• Dr Steven Kisseleff (SnT)
• Dr Vibhum Singh (SnT)

Contact: eva.lagunas@uni.lu