ESA Open Invitation to Tender AO9715
Open Date: 09/04/2019
Closing Date: 21/06/2019 13:00:00

Status: ISSUED
Reference Nr.: 19.1TT.04
Prog. Ref.: CC for Advanced Tech
Budget Ref.: E/0505-01C – CC for Advanced Tech
Special Prov.: BE+DK+FR+DE+IT+NL+ES+SE+CH+GB+IE+AT+NO+FI+PT+GR+LU+CZ+RO+CA
Tender Type: C
Price Range: 200-500 KEURO
Products: Ground Segment / Ground Station / Baseband equipment / Telemetry and Telecommand equipment, Tracking, Ranging and Doppler measurement equipment, CODECS, …
Techology Domains: RF Systems, Payloads and Technologies / Telecommunication Systems/Subsystems / Telecom Equipment
Establishment: ECSAT
Directorate: Directorate Telecom & Integrated Applica
Department: Telecom Technologies,Product&Systems Dep
Division: Technologies and Products Division
Contract Officer: Beardsell, Andrea
Industrial Policy Measure: C2 – Activities in open competition, significant partecipat…
Last Update Date: 09/04/2019
Update Reason: Tender issue

The objective of the activity is to design, develop and test an air interface enabling the reduction of the RF transmit power of remote Internet of Things (IoT) terminals connected directly to satellites.Targeted Improvements:To reduce by an order ofmagnitude the RF transmit power at the remote terminal.Description:Compared to the existing Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions that often occupy a relatively small uplink spectrum, an alternative approach with a larger bandwidth on the uplink while maintaining or reducing the transmit power is considered. Although the availability of spectrum in certain frequency bands could be challenging,solutions in Ku and Ka band are certainly appealing. The detection and decoding of signals transmitted from user terminals with ultra-low radiated power density is a more challenging task, which increases the complexity at the gateway-receiving end. The proposed activity aims to develop innovative techniques to be deployed at user terminal as well as the satellite gateway to allow for highly efficient use of satellite resources for massive uncoordinated and low duty-cycle traffic demand, with the emphasis on reducing the required transmit power per user terminal. Compared to the state-of-the-art an order of magnitude reduction in the transmit power istargeted. The starting point can be built upon the well-known solutions based on asynchronous Direct Sequence spread spectrum as used in ESTI S-MIM protocol. However, much larger spreading factor (above 1024) and/or lower coding rate (below 1/4) shall be considered.The activity targets the design, implementation and testing of the baseband and RF modules of a prototype ultra-low powered userterminal. The gateway counterparts could be either implemented in a selected hardware platform, or in a software, taking advantage of cloud computing based on CPU or GPU architecture as a proof of concept. The applicability of the proposed techniques to differentfrequency bands and GEO/LEO satellites will be investigated.The proposed solution shall bring down the energy consumption and recurring cost of the terminal, it shall reduce the off-axis emitted power thus improve coordination among different satellites, and provide more sophisticated security solutions since each terminal may use more protected security features at physical and link layers.Procurement Policy: C(2) = A relevant participation (in terms of quality and quantity) of non-primes (incl. SMEs) is required. For additional information please go to EMITS news “Industrial Policy measures for non-primes, SMEs and RD entities in ESA programmes”.