On April 14, we held a hugely successful webinar, ‘Expect a Greater Return’ on our latest innovation, the Mx-DMA MRC return technology. Hosted by our Product Management team, Bart Van Poucke and Bart Baekelandt, the webinar took a deep dive into MRC and explained why this is now the most efficient, dynamic return technology available on the market.
Mx-DMA MRC is a new patented, multiple-access waveform that brings new dimensions to our previous Mx-DMA HRC return technology. It offers the scalability of MF-TDMA (which allows efficient sharing of bandwidth on satellite return links) and the efficiency of SCPC – all in a single return technology that supports a wide variety of applications from high-bandwidth services on cruise ships to large enterprise and broadband – all the way down to low-bandwidth SCADA.
The webinar content took attendees though how Mx-DMA MRC works, the benefits it brings and the use cases it serves. Then, it went deeper, analyzing the different aspects of the technology and how it works. Our hosts explained how MRC effectively manages traffic burst and changing link conditions, maximizing available bandwidth resources for a given availability. They also explained how MX-DMA MRC adjusts MHz, the frequency plan, symbol rate, modulation, transmission length, code block size, and power, all in real-time.
We’d like to bring to you the Top 5 questions asked by customers during the live Q&A session following the in-depth presentation:
1) How is Mx-DMA MRC avoiding the tradeoffs in the network design and how do you run link budget for different scenarios?
There is no need for cumbersome trade-offs in pre-defining return carrier plans for a mix of terminal and service types, associated with MF-TDMA return technologies, as Mx-DMA MRC orchestrates the allocation of the available capacity automatically. This alleviates the downsides of predefined carrier planning such as penalties to efficiency as a result of oversized carriers, lower fill rates and utilization, and congestion. Mx-DMA MRC self-optimizes the link in real-time, so precise knowledge of the traffic or pre-selection of return technologies for different links is not required. As a result, it can support the delivery of a mix of different traffic profiles for thousands of terminals using a shared return capacity.
We have a link budgeting tool called the SatNet Calculator which allows the user to size networks with different mixes of terminal, link budget and service configurations and calculate expected capacity requirement.
2) How often is the capacity being allocated in Mx-DMA MRC?
In Mx-DMA MRC the capacity is being re-allocated every 40ms, however the minimum transmit duration is 5ms. Time is divided in 40ms frames, each frame is divided in 8 slots of 5ms. That’s why we refer to it as real-time allocation. Terminals can transmit in a single slot or in a concatenation of slots.
3) Is the MX-DMA MRC an evolution of a waveform standard such as DVB-S2X or is custom development?
Our Mx-DMA MRC return technology is a proprietary, patented development. Mx-DMA MRC supports a wide range of Modcods (34 granular Modcods to be exact) and uses the same low roll-off factors of 5% as found in the DVB-S2X standard. This waveform is accompanied by a highly dynamic and granular access scheme, supporting any mix of services at highest scale and efficiency.
4) How does Mx-DMA MRC reduce the hub footprint?
Built from the start with scalability in mind, the Mx-DMA MRC return technology can support networks of up to 5000 active terminals in a single satnet, all in shared capacity. On top of that, it can do this using a single demodulator, the MCD7500, greatly reducing hub footprint, cost and power consumption.
5) How is the jitter and latency affected for voice traffic?
Mx-DMA is designed to instantly react to changing network-wide demand by reassigning return capacity with a new transmission plan. The scheduler building the transmission plan is fully QoS aware and can adapt transmission plan parameters like code block size (1k/3k) and transmission interval to specifically optimize delay and jitter for low latency and low jitter traffic only.
If you missed the webinar or would like to watch it here. There’s also lots more information in the Mx-DMA MRC solutions overview that is downloadable from our resource library. Contact your sales representative or sales@idirect.net to understand how you can expect a greater return from Mx-DMA MRC.