Description
Priority 2 activities will only be initiated on the explicit request of at least one delegation.
Objective: To design and develop a real-time physical and link layer test bed to demonstrate the radio access cloudification concept (C-RAN) in satellite gateways. The outputs will be made available to standardisation groups.
Targeted Improvements: The spin-in of C-RAN technologies to satellite networks for some system scenarios could reduce the CAPEX and OPEX by more than 50% bylimiting the hardware components of gateways in the field and relocating most of the functions (link and physical layer) to a remote data centre/cloud. Re-distribution of functions between front end (RF/IF) - which remains in Gateway Hardware and the functions that can be implemented in Software therefore can be more centralised and placed into a data centre/cloud. The gateway virtualization can reduce by more than 50% the time to market of new services and the implementation, validation and maintenance of satellite gateway sub-systems by rapidly introduce targeted and tailored services based on customer needs.
Description: Satellite networks evolve towards a huge amount of bandwidth available (ultra-high throughput systems - UHTS) or with lower propagation delay (i.e. LEO constellations), which could deal with a large number of future services use cases in a cost-efficient manner.
Both UHTS and LEO constellations networks need to deploy a high number of gateways. The C-RAN concept diminishes the need for duplicating hardware infrastructure in different locations to provide site diversity. In case of UHTS the number of gateways result in network development and deployment costs of the same order of the single GEO UHTS satellite. In the case of LEO constellations, the large number of gateways required to permit visibility of higher number of satellites results also in network development and deployment costs orders of magnitudehigher than the space segment. Likewise, in case of narrowband satellite networks e.g. M2M, a virtual gateway can drastically reduce the take-up cost of the network allowing for rapid deployment of such networks.
The activity will design and develop a real-time test bed that demonstrates the applicability of physical layer and link layer cloudification technology to Satcom systems. The activity will address the technical challenges of radio cloudification and establish key parameters for satellite networks so as to determine their optimal operation considering both technical (required capacity, tolerable latency, operational ease) and economics (CAPEX/OPEX) and provide inputs to the on-going standardisation groups such as ETSI-reconfigurable radio, ETSI NVF, ITU-R 3GPP SA1/SA2 with satellite specific requirements and maintain a live test bed for demonstrating the opportunities brought by satellite networks to the 5G community.
The activity shall take advantage of a large set of Proof-of-Concepts test beds developed for the terrestrial systems as baseline for the proposed development. Only satellite specific delivery components developments are accounted in the proposedactivity.