PROSAT: on-board PROcessing techniques for high throughput SATellites

Funding source: FNR-CORE-PPP
Partner: SES S.A.
Principal investigator: Prof. Bjorn Ottersten
VPIs: Dr. Bhavani Shankar, Dr. Sina Maleki
Researchers: Dr. Symeon Chatzinotas, Dr. Bhavani Shankar, Dr. Sina Maleki, Dr. Juan Duncan, Dr. Vahid Joroughi, Ashok Bandi, Aakash Arora
Starting date and Duration: May 2017, 3 years

About the Project

On-board digital signal processing (OBP) is considered as the next revolution in the design of future generation of satellite networks enabling numerous capabilities. Such a technology helps the satellite industry to transform from delivery of capacity to delivery of services, thereby making the satellite a fully active element of the network, well integrated with the terrestrial network and thus revolutionizing their underlying business models. Currently, the benefits of OBP are mainly payload oriented with increased flexibility in connectivity, filtering and signal routing but PROSAT aims to extend similar benefits from communication oriented processing capabilities on-board. In this context, PROSAT studies the efficient usage of the space borne processing resources to meet the challenges in terms of the power per bit per second or power per MHz required in space to be applied to different interference processing techniques. Intra-system interference arising from aggressive frequency reuse and multicarrier processing as well as inter-system interference from unintended, malicious transmissions are considered. Precoding, multiple Gateway processing and digital predistortion are considered to mitigate intra-system interference and benefit from enhanced system capacity, efficient feeder link bandwidth utilization and spectral efficiency. Single and multifeed interference localization and mitigation are considered for inter-system interference to enhance operational efficiency and reliability and reduce the cost per bit. While, many of these have been implemented on-ground, they suffer from certain shortcomings including higher latency, lack of information among others which can be solved with OBP. Challenges arise when implementing these algorithms in a power constrained payload in presence of hardware impairments as well as minimizing the side information from ground needed to run these techniques. The results of PROSAT would further energize the development and deployment of OBP based payloads in future generation satellite systems, and lead to reduction of cost and power per bit, thereby benefiting the satellite industry.

 

Figure 1: Interference monitoring using OBP

 

Figure 2: Localisation using OBP

Project Partners:

1. SIGCOM, SnT, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, (https://wwwen.uni.lu/snt/research/sigcom)
2. SES S.A., Betzdorf, Luxembourg

Funding Details:

Funding Source: National Research Fund, Luxembourg
Project start date: April 2017
Expected End date: April 2020

Management Team:

PI: Prof. Bjorn Ottersten (SnT)
Vice PIs: Dr. Sina Maleki (SnT), Dr. Bhavani Shankar (SnT)

Research Team:

• Dr. Symeon Chatzinotas (SnT)
• Dr. Bhavani Shankar (SnT)
• Dr. Sina Maleki (SnT)
• Dr. Juan Duncan (SnT)
• Dr. Vahid Joroughi (Visiting Researcher)
• Ashok Bandi (SnT)
• Aakash Arora (SnT)

Industrial Collaborators:

• Dr. Joel Grotz (SES)
• Mr. Jean-Pierre Choffray (SES)

Structure and Work Packages:

WP1: Scenarios Consolidation for enabling on-board interference processing
WP2: OBP for inter system interference mitigation
WP3: OBP based precoding
WP4: OBP based Multicarrier Predistortion
WP5: Technique selection, Demonstration and Validation
WP6: Dissemination and Exploitation of results
WP7: Management

Expected Outcomes:

1. Requirement list on payload for enabling advanced on-board signal processing
2. Reduced complexity interference mitigation algorithms amenable for on-board implementation
3. Sensitivity Analysis of algorithms to payload hardware imperfections
4. Software system simulator for performance assessment incorporating the developed techniques and models for hardware imperfections; In-lab validation of selected techniques
5. Creation of patent and publication portfolio

Relevant Links:

SATSENT

CO2SAT

SeMIGod

PreDem

MCPRED

Relevant Articles

1. Weak Interference Detection with Signal Cancellation in Satellite Communications
   Politis, Christos; Maleki, Sina; Tsinos, Christos; Chatzinotas, Symeon; Ottersten, Björn, in The 42nd IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2017 (2017)
2. Simultaneous Sensing and Transmission for Cognitive Radios with Imperfect Signal Cancellation
   Politis, Christos; Maleki, Sina; Tsinos, Christos; Liolis`, Konstantinos; Chatzinotas, Symeon; Ottersten, Björn in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2017)
3. On-board Signal Predistortion for Digital Transparent Satellites
   Mazzali, Nicolò; Shankar, Bhavani; Ottersten, Björn in Proceedings on IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC)

Contact:

Dr. Sina Maleki

Dr. Bhavani Shankar