FNR FlexSat

FNR FlexSat: Resource Optimization for Next Generation of Flexible SATellite Payloads 

Project Description:

Nowadays, the satcom industry is witnessing a revolution regarding the space segment, with the full payload digitalization. The latter is arguably one of the most exciting developments in the satcom industry to date, since enables more sophisticated payload designs able to adapt the satellite resources to the real and moving traffic conditions. The aforementioned flexibility combined with the interference management strategies open a door to advanced resource management strategies for flexible satellite systems, but at the same time bring new research challenges, which have to be addressed so that the full potential of flexible payloads is unleashed.

“FlexSAT” stands for “Resource Optimization for Next Generation of Flexible SATellite Payloads”, and is based on the SES view of the future satellite systems, which will include an intelligent unit called Satellite Dynamic Resource Management (SDRM). The SDRM interconnects in an automated manner the network operational center (NOC) and the satellite operations (SOC), and represents the intelligence of the system. The main goal of SDRM is to achieve a traffic and link condition based automated network resources optimization. FlexSAT will try to optimize the algorithmics behind the SDRM block.

FlexSAT will investigate and develop advanced resource allocation solutions that fit the future payload capabilities and satisfy the satellite operators’ interests. Instead of boosting the satellite throughput (which has been the objective of many previous works), the goal of FlexSAT is to assigned the available resources in such a way that the satellite offered capacity on ground continuously matches the geographic distribution of the traffic demand and follows its variations in time. More precisely, FlexSAT will investigate and proposed novel algorithmic solutions for:

1) Dynamically assigning frequency / bandwidth and power over the coverage area

2) Dynamically design the illumination of active beams over time (beam hopping pattern)

3) Demand-based user scheduling

4) Load balancing in Multi-Gateway (GW) systems, to relax the feeder link congestion

Funding:

This project is funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) under the CORE program

Industrial Partner: SES Luxembourg (Dr. Joel Grotz)

Academic Mentor / Partner: Prof. Carlos Mosquera from Univ. of Vigo (Spain) and atlanTTic Research Center, Vigo, Spain

PhD students: 

Lin Chen (graduation expexted in 2024) with thesis "Satellite Dynamic Resource Management Optimization for Flexible Satellite Payloads"

Tedros S. Abdu (graduated in 2022) with thesis "Resource Management Techniques for Flexible Broadband Satellite Communication Systems"

Contact:

• Dr Eva Lagunas (SnT) – PI