Led by Space Engineering of Italy, the team included ASCOM of Switzerland, IMST of Germany and CoRiTel of Italy. They were successful in making a variety of technologies realistically emulated in real-time. These include: multibeam satellite constellations (from LEO to GEO), traffic interference, time variant propagation delay, Doppler and Doppler rate and mobile fading channels. A powerful high-accuracy real-time channel simulator has also been developed by ASCOM with the capability of covering both terrestrial and satellite mobile channels. This channel simulator is now commercialised by ASCOM as an independent product named SIMSTAR. Advanced signal processing both at the gateway and mobile terminal allows the experimentation of features such as multi-level power control, path diversity, soft-hand-off, CDMA interference mitigation, turbo coding. The testbed supports bit rates up to 384 Kbps in the downlink and 128 Kbps in the uplink. The Wideband CDMA air interface implemented in the testbed is in line with what was specified during Phase 1 of the Contract and approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 1999 as IMT-2000 compliant for satellite UMTS. The physical layer technical specifications were also published by ETSI. The testbed is now being further evolved called 'S-UMTS Advanced Testbed' which will also support true packet switched, reliable multicast and narrowcast services in addition to the unicast service already supported by the current testbed. The results of this activity are being submitted to ETSI S-UMTS Working Group. Specific 3G applications (e.g. location-based 3G-services) will also be developed on top of the unicast servive currently available. Furthermore, the ATB testbed will allow the over-the-air demonstration of S-UMTS services using the Artemis L-band payload. The service demonstrations, currently planned for mid 2003, will be provided by the advanced multimedia mobile van recently developed for ETSI by Jonnaeum Research.
To read an abstract on "the ESA Advanced Test Bed (ATB) Project", click on the link on the right of this page.
