Join iDirect’s Wayne Haubner, Senior Vice President of Emerging Technologies, as he discusses the new architecture satellite systems will require to meet future demands at the Satellite Innovation Symposium conference. The session, Digesting Software’s New Role, is on Oct. 2 at 1 p.m. PDT.
The system architecture of next-generation satellite networks will differ greatly from today’s systems.
Here’s why: End users are demanding more and more bandwidth for their data-hungry applications, with no sign of slowing down.
Satellite operators and service providers are struggling to meet the needs of this explosive growth in capacity demand, and are also under tremendous pressure to reduce the capital and operating expense of these systems. Additionally, they are required to deliver new services and capabilities to clients at a faster pace.
Satellite systems of the future will have an explosion of spacecraft and teleports. Where today a global network may contain perhaps a couple dozen spacecraft, new LEO constellations will allow global networks to contain hundreds of spacecraft. Operators may create hybrid constellations with spacecraft operating at different orbits, perhaps with different waveforms or capabilities. These constellations will leverage dozens, if not hundreds, of teleports.
The complexity of these new networks, combined with the explosion of devices to the millions or billions, make our traditional network management and monitoring systems obsolete.
Fortunately, the satellite industry is not facing these challenges alone. The terrestrial wireless industry has been managing through this for the past decade. Much of the work in the 5G space has been to address the challenges we now face. And there is an array of networking innovations being embraced today across telecom that provide a future network infrastructure – innovations like Software Defined Networking, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Big Data and Machine Learning.
These technologies enable self-organizing networks with cognitive network management capabilities that can automatically configure, monitor and repair networks to ensure peak performance.
The new equation for success looks something like this:
More features and capabilities + Dramatically reduced cost + Delivered faster = Success
It is truly an amazing time to be evolving our satellite communication systems into the network of the future. The breadth of innovation across industries in the technology areas can easily be adapted and consumed by our core satellite networks delivering on the promise of a global, hyper-connective network to meet the growing demands of our partners.