AMERHIS - ESA

1 AMERHISA New Generation of Satellite Communications SystemsBR-226 June 2004aCONTENTS4 Introduction7 AMERHIS A New Era in Satellite Communications10 What Services Can AMERHIS Offer?12 Internet Service Providers14 corporate Services15 Video Services17 AMERHIS Applications18 System Elements Space Segment - The regenerative payload Ground Segment22 The Industrial Consortium24 Are you Interested in AMERHIS ?334 IntroductionSatellite telecommunications has now reached an advancedstage of maturity, with nearly 40 satellite operatorscontrolling around 250 satellites in geostationary orbit. Theservices that those operators provide range from backbonetrunks in the telephony and data network fields, to thedistribution and broadcasting of thousands of TV channelsto hundreds ofmillions of usersaround the as they are today,satellite systems are on the brink ofyet another revolution that willdoubtless have a significant impactin the not too distant future.

2 Thisrevolution will be brought about bythe provision of a new generation ofcost-effective broadbandinteractive services, initially tolarger corporations, later tosmall and medium-sized enterprises,and eventually toprivate bases for the introduction of these newservices are firstly the introduction ofmultiple spot beams, allowing greateroptimisation in the use of satellite resources(power and spectrum), and secondly theconsolidation of open standards based on thesuccessful DVB-S/DVB-RCS suite. Designingaround open standards guarantees multi-vendor provisioning of terminals andservices, which is fundamental to thedevelopment of economies of scale and thecreation of an open competitive consolidation of the DVB-based open-standard approach has paved the way for theintroduction of a new satellite payload andsystem architecture, whereby a number oftransponders on the satellite can beinterconnected by means of an onboarddigital switch.

3 In this way, the networktopology becomes a star that hinges aroundthe node constituted by the satellite and allits transponders. This architecture allowsindependent optimisation of the resourcesassigned to each transponder in terms ofcoverage, power and and CDTI, through the Agency sTelecommunications and Spain s nationalspace programmes, together with Europeanand Canadian Industry, have beenelaborating these concepts for a number ofyears. As a consequence, all of the majorelements needed for the system - onboard multi-carrier demodulators,switches, modulators, network controlcentres, gateways and user terminals - are now readily opportunity to deploy these systemconcepts on Hispasat s Amazonas satellitetherefore came at a very opportune combines split coverage of fourcoverage areas in the Ku-band and couldtherefore benefit substantially from the newonboard processing system architectureproposed by ESA.

4 As a result, Hispasat SA,Spain s Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnol gicoe Industrial (CDTI), and ESA reached anagreement concerning the implementation ofa DVB-based On-board Processor andcomplementary terrestrial infrastructure andterminals known as the AMERHIS System .The main funding for AMERHIS has beenprovided from the Spanish contribution toESA s ARTES Programme, with additionalsupport from France, Norway and is the first operational regenerative,onboard processing, satellite switchingsystem in the World. Its introduction pavesthe way for the emergence of a newgeneration of satellite systems that willfurther enhance the claim that satellitecommunication is one of the most importantapplications of space technology. Beyond its great technological andcommercial interest, AMERHIS is an excellentexample of collaboration between ESA and aEuropean satellite operator, resulting fromthe Europeanisation of an initiative withinSpain s national space programme.

5 Figure 1 The Amazonas satellite, which is stationed at 61 degW556 Figure 2 Amazonas coverage: zones served by AMERHIS in the Ku-bandAmerHis A New Era in SatelliteCommunicationsAmerHis is an advanced communications system, basedaround the Alcatel 9343 DVB On-Board Processor, carried byHispasat s Amazonas satellite. This processor has thecapacity to provide the demodulation, decoding, switching,encoding and modulation for the four transponders onAmazonas. Each Ku-band transponder covers one of the fourgeographical regions served by the satellite, namely: Europe,Brazil, and North and South America, as shown in Figure AMERHIS system provides a fully compatible interface with the DVB Return ChannelSatellite (DVB-RCS) open initial terrestrial system configuration will include: A Management System (MS), consisting of a Network Control Centre (NCC) and associated management control, responsible for managing the onboard resources and user terminals.

6 User Terminals (RCSTs) oriented towards the commercial demonstration of new services. Gateways (RSGWs) that will provide the system with access to terrestrial to AMERHIS , Hispasat is able to offer broadband interconnectivity to users anywherewithin the four geographical areas covered by Amazonas, with highly efficient usage of thespace segment (single hop). It also allows Hispasat to differentiate its portfolio of services fromthose of its competitors and to position itself as one of the most advanced satellite operators oneither side of the Figure 3 AMERHIS system architectureThe combination of onboard processing(OBP) and a full compatibility with the openstandards of DVB-S (downlink) and DVB-RCS (uplink) gives the telecommunicationssatellite unprecedented potential comparedwith the conventional bent-pipearchitectures. The AMERHIS systemarchitecture is shown in Figure 3.

7 Among themost important advantages provided by theOBP are: Provision of direct end-to-end connectivity between any two users in different regions through a single satellite hop. This allows real-time voice and videoservices, as well reducing bandwidth usage. Full flexibility both for the interconnectionof coverage areas and payload-capacity management, allowing optimum exploitation of available onboard resources (so-called dynamic bandwidth on demand ). The system supports predictable symmetric (up- and downlink)traffic, as well as bursty traffic generated by a large number of users, owing to the dynamic resource-allocation process. The regenerative nature of the AMERHIS payload and the utilisation of DVB-S saturated carriers on each downlink provide substantial performance improvements when using the AMERHIS enabled transponders. These improvements are reflected both in their enhanced throughput capacity and the reduced receive-antenna size requirements for features, combined with the use ofstandard low-cost and high-performance userterminals (broadband interactive), will foster aqualitative step forward in the successfuldevelopment of interactive multimediaservices via 4 AMERHIS provides connectivitybetween spot-beam coverage areas withoutthe need for double hops between ground andspacecraft 9910 What Services Can AMERHIS Offer?

8 AMERHIS is a win-win-win solution for Interactive NetworkAccess Providers (INAPs), service providers and customers. Themuch greater flexibility for managing and selling capacity issuch that all of the main players will benefit from thisadvanced technology. Real- and non-real-time multimediaservices and applications can be provided onreadily available DVB-S/DVB-RCScompatible terminals. The systempermits the assignment of resourcesto different subnetworks in a veryflexible manner and allows usertransmission rates ranging from512 kbit/s to 8 Mbit/sec. Thesystem supports IP-based as wellas native MPEG-based services,with efficient mechanisms for theprovision of uni- and multi-castservices, and the possibility to definevarious quality-of-service (QoS) levels to meet differing user terms ofconnectivity, AMERHIS providesinterconnectionswith terrestrialnetworks (Internet, ISDN, publicswitched telephone, etc.)

9 Through low-cost gatewayterminals. It supports both meshconnectivity and star connectivity, inboth cases with just one satellite hop ,with unidirectional or bi-directional point-to-point connections and unidirectional point-to-multipoint connections being possible inboth cases. These types of connections caneither be established on demand by theterminals and the gateways, or by theManagement System. A given connection canbe assigned one of three priorities withinAmerHis, namely low priority, high priority,or high priority jitter-sensitive, each of whichis associated with a specific set of trafficparameters. An admission-control functionensures optimal use of the available capacityand provision of the best possible service forthe different types of physical capacity of AMERHIS isdistributed over Virtual Private Networks(VPNs). Each VPN can be allocated adedicated set of logical capacity, reflectingthe service provider s needs, or it can share aset with other VPN's.

10 Any VPN can also takeadvantage of the AMERHIS is therefore creating a new era for relationships between INAPs, serviceproviders and customers by offering muchmore flexibility than any satellite-basedsystem so far. As a connection-orientedsystem, it allows full control over theapplications crossing the network and theamount of resources allocated to thoseapplications. In this way, over-provisioningcan be avoided and billing is triggered onlywhen applications are really using thenetwork. This opens the door for newbusiness models, reflected in turn in theService-Level Agreement (SLA) between theINAP and service provider or serviceprovider and examples of AMERHIS deploymentscenarios are discussed in the Service ProvidersIn this scenario, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) managetheir own low-cost gateway and can provide reliable Internetaccess to subscribers. Value-added services such as Voice overIP (VoIP) or even video conferencing based on the ITU can be provided to individual customers via a simpleconfiguration.