ESA Open Invitation to Tender: 1-10728
Open Date: 07/03/2022 15:27 CEST
Closing Date: 16/05/2022 13:00 CEST

The objective of the activity is to develop and test a non-orthogonal multiple access scheme for satellite uplink to increase the overall system’s return link throughput for selected scenarios. An over-the-air end-to-end system demonstrator will be developed and the developed non-orthogonal multiple access scheme will be tested. Targeted Improvements: Increasing the system’s aggregated return link throughput by 60%; Reducing the return link’s latency by 50%. Description: Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is considered to be a key technology for the next generations of terrestrial wireless communication systems to enhance the system capacity, user connectivity and service latency. Similarly, the use of NOMA techniques in satellite networks could dramatically improve the return link throughput and latency. This is particularly applicable where two or multiple distinct classes of user terminals are sharing system resources. For example, user terminals with different antenna sizes often create large power imbalances of the signals detected at the receiver. This allows the gateway to distinguish the signals and system to use the same resources for multiple terminals. Hence, this activity will develop and test NOMA techniques for satellite return links, such as successive interference cancellation at the gateway, and will benchmark their performance in terms of overall system capacity and the service delay. The developments will consider realistic system models and impairments in terms of channel estimation or other satellite channel characteristics. The activity will select system scenarios and use cases where NOMA techniques can provide considerable improvement according to pre-selected figures of merit. It will then identify the appropriate models to describe the various impairments that may affect the performance of the NOMA techniques in satellite system and will develop specific NOMA techniques accordingly. In a next step the techniques will be implemented into a software defined NOMA receiver and transmitter. Performance will be tested and compared against classic orthogonal access. Finally, an end-to-end system test bed will be developed. An over-the-air testing campaign will be carried out to assess the performance of the proposed NOMA solutions in realistic conditions. Procurement Policy: C2: Activities are in open competition, where a significant participation of non-LSIs is requested. For additional information please go to EMITS news “Industrial Policy measures for non-primes, SMEs and RD entities in ESA programmes”. Footnote: On Delegation Request activities will only be initiated on the explicit request of at least one National Delegation.

Directorate: Directorate Telecom Integrated Applica
Estabilishment: ESTEC
ECOS Required: No
Classified: No
Price Range: > 500 KEURO
Authorised Contact Person: Florence Odette Jeanne Glandieres
Initiating Service: TIA-TT
IP Measure: C2
Prog. Reference: E/0534-01G – CC-AT 4.0.1
Tender Type: Open Competition
Open To Tenderers From: AT+BE+CA+CH+CZ+DE+DK+EL+ES+FI+FR+GB+HU+IE+IT+LU+NL+NO+PL+PT+RO+SE
Technology Keywords: 6-A-I-Telecom System Engineering Tools
Products Keywords: 2-L-1-a-Omnidirectional, Helix, Horn, Parabolic, Phased Arrays / Platform vs Payload / 2-L-2-a-X-band, S-Band, Ka band,… / Near Earth application, Deep space application,…/ Platform vs Payload