ESA Open Invitation to Tender AO9025
Open Date: 21/11/2017
Closing Date: 20/02/2018 13:00:00

Status: ISSUED
Reference Nr.: 17.1TT.10
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: Satellites & Probes / RF / Microwave Communication (Platform and Payloads) / RF Comm. Eng. SW / SW for RF Comm. design, analysis, simulation, etc.
Techology Domains: RF Systems, Payloads and Technologies / Telecommunication Systems/Subsystems / Telecom System Engineering Tools
RF Systems, Payloads and Technologies / Telecommunication Systems/Subsystems / Telecom Signal Processing
Establishment: ECSAT
Directorate: Directorate Telecom & Integrated Applica
Department: Telecom Technologies,Product&Systems Dep
Division: Future Projects Division
Contract Officer: Dorval, Nathalie
Industrial Policy Measure: C2 – Activities in open competition, significant partecipat…
Last Update Date: 21/11/2017
Update Reason: Tender issue

Objective:The objective of the activity is to design and develop physical and medium access control (MAC) layer techniques for unicast services to significantly improve the forward link throughput of satellite broadband systems. An emulator shall be developed todemonstrate the achieved throughput improvements.Targeted Improvements:To improve the useful throughput of satellite broadband networks by up to a factor of 2Description:Satellite broadband networks have historically relied on waveforms meant for broadcasting given the commercial success of DTH. Some design choices adopted for such waveforms are however sub-optimal for unicast traffic and constrain the system flexibility and capacity.Recent studies have identified a number of techniques for the evolution of broadcasting waveforms to better support unicast traffic and significantly increase the throughput of satellite broadband networks. The coreof the innovation lies in introducing a set of flexible modulation and short coding schemes which (1) improve the energy efficiencyof highly spectral-efficient schemes and (2) improve the effectiveness of interference mitigation techniques. Such studies have shown that theoretically the useful throughput of broadband networks can be doubled in certain system scenarios. Nonetheless, the actual performance of these techniques is sensitive to real-life link impairments which must be properly accounted for in their design.Hence in this activity, physical and medium access control (MAC) layer techniques for unicast broadband application shall be developed taking into account all impairments of a satellite link. The achieved performance improvement shall be assessed in a number of scenarios encompassing broadband networks with different satellite payload architectures and different coverage size. The performance shall be assessed at least in terms of useful throughput and availability. A system emulator shall be developed to demonstrate the achieved improvements. Such emulator shall properly model all the main ground and payload elements as well as the end-to-end channel impairments. In addition, the activity shall prototype in hardware critical functions to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposedconcepts within a reasonable complexity.Procurement Policy: C(2) = A relevant participation (in terms of quality and quantity) ofnon-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”.

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