High Throughput Satellites: Issues in Comparing Capacities

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, satellite telecommunications have evolved significantly with the deployment of high throughput satellite systems offering Terabps capacity. Most often, operators and analysts evaluate this system capacity adding the forward and return data rates, obtained by multiplying the number of satellites by the available bandwidth, the frequency reuse factor and a typical spectral efficiency for each link. After presenting this first level solution, the paper proposes a methodology to evaluate HTS system capacity in three steps: IP throughput from link budget analysis, capacity obtained at the satellite level, influence of system configurations (users, gateways, services).