LEO FLOPs

Status

Ongoing
Status date

2025-01-17
Activity Code

3A.170

Objectives

The design and demonstration of link protection and restoration protocols, suitable for enhancing the reliability of optical feeder link systems. The solution shall be commercially competitive compared to radio frequency (RF) feeder systems for low Earth orbit satellite constellations, and result in similar or better performance with respect to key system parameters like latency, jitter or throughput.

Challenges

Reliable connectivity to a LEO constellation using optical feeders faces major challenges:

Short contact times require a large, spatially dispersed network to ensure availability.
Cloud cover and atmospheric turbulence induced outages decrease the planning reliability of these links.
The solution needs to commercially competitive at very high data rates (>=100Gbit/s), otherwise RF solutions prevail.

Benefits

LEO FLOPs provides an enhanced constellation emulation capability of an integrated space and ground backhaul network that allows extraction of key performance indicators of selected protection schemes.

These indicators offer a realistic assessment to decision makers on expected worst-case packet loss, restoration time and impact on latency for an unexpectedly unavailable feeder link. In addition, the product is capable of performing real-time demonstrations and interoperate with other network equipment.

Features

The High thRoughput Optical Network (HydRON) Simulation Testbed, which provides extensions of the testbed towards a realistic handling of feeder links.

System Architecture

The system architecture will become available after the conclusion of system trades.

Plan

The project is split into two stages:

Analysis and evaluation of existing methods, along with the assessment of feasibility for implementation into the emulator.
Implementation, performance benchmarking, and result analysis.

Current status

The project has started and completed reviewing literature and assessing state-of-the-art.