SATCOM innovation: Priorities for modern development

Abstract

As DoD SATCOM stakeholders and developers, it is vital to understand innovative technical trends and both leverage and influence them in order to best address our priorities. These SATCOM development priorities are growth, adoption of open commercial standards, systemic availability and simplification. Major innovative trends in SATCOM development are Digital IF, modem advances and geographical distribution of strategic RF entry points. Digital IF uses standards-based DSP innovation to enable highly advantageous SATCOM terminal system repartitioning. Modem innovations include updated protocols, interface reduction, all-digital implementations, tailoring of mod-cod sets, automated power and mod-cod responsive to traffic demand and link condition, and detailed attention to human factors. Geographic distribution of strategic RF entry points offers geographic diversity through terrestrial IF transport. All of these innovative trends enable growth in capabilities, bandwidth, link counts and systemic availability. All are based on open commercial standards which serve to simplify development, equipment, test processes, planning and operations. The challenge now is to leverage the progress of these trends optimally to help the DoD SATCOM user best support the warfighter. Optimal development along these trend lines, addressing the cited priorities, will be realized by greater awareness of these trends, rapid adoption of commercial offerings and adoption of open commercial standards along the lines of maximum commercial proliferation. On all counts, close collaboration between stakeholders is key to realizing the potential of these innovative trends.