ESA Open Invitation to Tender AO9745
Open Date: 28/11/2019
Closing Date: 09/04/2020 13:00:00

Status: ISSUED
Reference Nr.: 19.1TT.26
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+HU
Tender Type: C
Price Range: > 500 KEURO
Products: Satellites & Probes / System Engineering Software / System Modelling & Simulation / Other
Technology Domains: RF Systems, Payloads and Technologies / Telecommunication Systems/Subsystems / Networking Techniques
Establishment: ESTEC
Directorate: Directorate Telecom & Integrated Applica
Department: Telecom Technologies,Product&Systems Dep
Division: Future Projects Division
Contract Officer: Beardsell, Andrea
Industrial Policy Measure: N/A – Not apply
Last Update Date: 28/11/2019
Update Reason: Tender issue

The objective of the activity is to prototype a network controller and orchestrator that uses the network telemetry and control data in real-time rather thanallocating resources statically a priori. The activity will develop a testbed for validating the concept. Targeted Improvements: Enabling real-time network control based on network telemetry data. Description: Satcom systems have traditionally controlled and managed the network in a static fashion. They allocate resources a priori according to the quality of service agreed well in advance with the users and keep the allocation regardless of its use. This approach will be unacceptable in 5G satellite networks. In the future, users will request operators to set up and tear down end-to-end services with minimum lead-time, for a variety of applications with utterly different requirements. This will oblige satellite systems not only to integrate seamlessly with terrestrial networks, but also to be capable of allocating dynamically network resources to set up new services (i.e. network slicing) while continuously managing them to meet the performance requirements without compromising resources unnecessarily. Unlike current approaches, the network control and orchestration of future satellite systems will therefore need to configure and manage the network based on the real time monitoring of its state and usage. This approach is known as data-driven network management. This activity aims to investigate network control and orchestration algorithms to enable data-driven satcom network management and configuration infuture integrated satellite-terrestrial networks. This will include data mining and analysis to optimize the performance of both the radio access and the network. The activity will develop and implement methods and algorithms that allow automated network control based on network-generated information (data-driven networking), users’ data (context-awareness), and the measured and predicted performance of the network. In addition to simulation of the algorithms, the activity will validate the proposed data-driven control and management techniques in a test bed in the context of integrated 5G satellite-terrestrial networks. Interfaces to ETSI SDN/NVF orchestration framework (ETSI, 3GPP SA2 architecture) and widely used Open Network Foundation (ONF) and/or Open NetworkAutomation Platform (ONAP) implementations will be developed.