ESA Open Invitation to Tender: 1-11126
Open Date: 30/06/2022 12:29 CEST
Closing Date: 14/10/2022 13:00 CEST

Objective: The objective of this activity is to design, develop and test protocols and algorithms for mobility, routing, multicasting, group communications, and resource management for mission critical services, including Push-To-Talk, Data, and Video, in dense Low Earth Orbit satellite networks with and without inter-satellite links. Targeted Improvements: Compliance with mission critical service requirements in 5G Release-16 specifications. 40% reduction in voice latency. More than 90% reduction in talk group setup latency. Description: Mission Critical Services (MCS) include data, video and Push-to-Talk (PTT) voice services that must be provided with high availability and under challenging conditions where human life or health is in danger. Requirements for these applications have been revisited by 5G which released technical specifications in 3GPP release 16, listing detailed common and specific requirements for different MCS (Tight latency requirements, group communication capabilities, and device heterogeneity, etc.). These need to be addressed by future satellite networks to ensure compliancy of these safety services. Low-altitude, dense satellite constellation networks allow reducing latencies and device sizes, and increase link resilience thanks to large overlapping footprints. However, they come with their own networking challenges due to high satellite mobility and small, yet largely overlapping, footprints. While small footprints require frequent handovers and secure group management protocols for communication groups with members served by different satellites in the network, large footprint overlaps bring about the possibility of improved network resilience and increased transmission rates for user terminals with multiple transceivers. In this activity, protocols for mobility, routing, multicasting, group communications, and resource management shall be developed and demonstrated for MCS over dense LEO satellite constellation networks with/without inter-satellite links, and their performances shall be compared against those in relevant 5G specifications. The reference scenarios shall include multi-mode devices in addition to land-mobile or airborne access points providing access to other devices with no line-of-sight to satellites. A testbed will be developed in order to validate the prototype protocol implementations with real or representative applications.

Directorate: Directorate Telecom Integrated Applica
Estabilishment: ESTEC
ECOS Required: No
Classified: No
Price Range: > 500 KEURO
Authorised Contact Person: Nathalie Dorval
Initiating Service: TIA-TI
IP Measure: N/A
Prog. Reference: E/0534-04A – 4S-Other Act. Prod&T
Tender Type: Open Competition
Open To Tenderers From: AT+BE+CA+CH+CZ+DE+DK+GR+ES+FI+FR+GB+HU+IE+IT+LU+NL+NO+PL+PT+RO
Technology Keywords: 1-A-II-Hardware Technologies for Payload Data Processing / 1-A-III-Software Technologies for Payload Data Processing / 6-A-III-Networking Techniques / 6-A-V-Telecom Security Techniques and Technologies / 12-B-II-Communication Network Technologies and Protocols
Products Keywords: 2-L-5-a-SW for RF Comm. design, analysis, simulation, etc. / 4-B-3-a-Telemetry and Telecommand equipment, Tracking, Ranging and Doppler measurement equipment, CODECS,…