ESA Open Invitation to Tender AO10199
Open Date: 17/06/2020
Closing Date: 24/09/2020 13:00:00

Status: ISSUED
Reference Nr.: 20.1TT.19
Prog. Ref.: CC-AT 4.0.1
Budget Ref.: E/0534-01G – CC-AT 4.0.1
Special Prov.: BE+DK+FR+DE+IT+NL+ES+SE+CH+GB+IE+AT+NO+FI+PT+GR+LU+CZ+RO+CA+HU+PL
Tender Type: C
Price Range: > 500 KEURO
Products: Satellites & Probes / Other
Technology Domains: RF Systems, Payloads and Technologies / RF Technologies and Equipment / RF Modelling and Design Tools
Establishment: ESTEC
Directorate: Directorate Telecom & Integrated Applica
Department: Telecom Technologies,Product&Systems Dep
Division: Technologies and Products Division
Contract Officer: Glandieres, Florence Odette Jeanne
Industrial Policy Measure: N/A – Not apply
Last Update Date: 17/06/2020
Update Reason: Tender issue

Objective: The objective of the activity is to develop specific waveforms for regenerative satellite systems enabling multi-Gigabitthroughput. The impact of the developed waveforms on the payload performance will be assessed by breadboarding with COTS hardware critical functions such as modulators, demodulators, coders and decoders. Besides, the impact of the waveforms at system level and the overall throughput will be assessed by end-to-end system simulations. Targeted Improvements: Doubling the throughput of current regenerative satellite systems. Description: Regenerative payloads can achieve higher spectral efficiencies than transparent ones given their intrinsic capability to decouple the downlink from the uplink and use the most efficient modulation and coding for each. In particular, this enables them to exploit the usually better link budgets in the feeder link to reduce the number of required gateways. This latter feature is of particular interest to Very High Throughput Systems (VHTS) as they need a significant number of them. However, the mass and power requirements of the on-board processor in a regenerative payload becomes prohibitive for throughputs in the order of hundreds of Gbps. This is mostly driven by the demodulator and decoders of the uplink signals. To mitigate this issue, the activity will develop specific waveforms for regenerative payloads with the aim of minimising the mass and power requirementsof the on-board processor. The activity will prototype with COTS HW the associated digital blocks (modulators/demodulators, coders/decoders) and payload critical elements to validate the developments. These prototypes will feed an end-to-end system simulator to assess its performance for star and mesh architectures. With this information, the activity will determine the impact of the new waveforms to the overall system, especially to the sizing of the ground segment and payload.