Beamforming Architectures for Advanced MSS Network Deployment

Abstract

Over the last forty years, mobile satellite services (MSS) and systems have been established as one of the strongest sectors of the overall satellite industry, due to their ability to provide anytime, anywhere telecommunications access. Boeing has been in the forefront of bringing satellite and payload technology to the market throughout this time period and is continuing to deliver advanced capabilities to the industry. The ever advancing technological breakthroughs of MSS systems have brought increasing benefits to commercial markets, governments and global society. Behind this progress however has swirled an ever increasing business and political complexity, which has seen driven both tremendous business success and failure. Recent decisions to allow ancillary terrestrial component (ATC) re-use of satellite spectrum for terrestrial applications has greatly increased the business viability of some mobile satellite systems while creating additional political and spectrum coordination complexities. Currently, various studies for the Asia-Pacific region in particular are underway, as next generation architectures are being examined from various perspectives, including commercial, geopolitical, and regulatory. The MSS market today has reached a point at which tremendous technical capabilities have provided new options for business and government decision makers. Recent deployments of 4 generation MSS systems have included architectural and technical features that provide greatly increased performance and connectivity flexibility to the larger telecommunications networks. Systems operators in both the government and commercial spheres are demanding the capability for near instantaneous modification of satellite beamforming and bandwidth connectivity over the life of the system. Beamforming flexibility has become almost mandatory to allow operators to adapt to changing market needs and an ever increasing interference environment, while also providing immediate natural disaster and other emergency response. To provide such flexibility, both on-board and ground-based beamforming architectures have been developed, each with unique strengths and weaknesses. Selecting the best flexible beamforming architecture and technology for a given system deployment has become a complex discussion whose drivers are as much political and business oriented as they are purely technical. In this paper, we present an overview of on-board and ground-based beamforming architectures within the context of the greater system architecture. Then we present a trade space for ground-based beamforming with an example based on a system based in Japan.